The Pirelli Calendar, 1964-97

A celebrated international gallery of photographic beauty, the Pirelli Calendar has featured such top models as Iman, Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss. Its acclaimed photographers, among them Peter Knapp, Joyce Tennison, Robert Freeman, Norman Parkinson, Peter Lindbergh and Richard Avedon, have defined through select images a unique ideal of beauty in the world: erotic escape from reality. Innovative visual fantasies, somewhere between glamour photography and the fashion photography which would become unbiquitous to mainstream advertising, made the calendar an astonishing success from its first publication in 1963. Now every page of every Pirelli calendar and the out-takes are brought together in this collection. Photographic historian Italo Zannier and journalist Guido Vergani trace the calendar's evolution over three and a half decades, revealing a history of beauty in photographs.