Press Release
CHERIE NUTTING
YESTERDAY'S PERFUME: AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT OF PAUL BOWLES
MAY 23 - JUNE 29, 2002
In summer 2002, the June Bateman Fine Art presented an exhibition of Cherie Nutting's photographs of Paul Bowles and the world in which he lived. Many of the prints were given special importance through short, poetic comments
written directly on the photographs by Bowles himself. The exhibit offered an intimate glimpse into the life of one of the twentieth century's most important artists and composers.
Ms. Nutting first visited and photographed Paul Bowles in 1986 and remained close friends with him until his death in 1999. In the thirteen years she knew Bowles she photographed him frequently, engaging in both formal
portraiture and informal snapshots to record mo ments as a close friend, rather than a photographer on assignment. The resulting photographs offer an unparalleled in-depth exploration of the sensibility and world of a great
artist. Whether pictured standing in a doorway at home, visiting a pet cemetery to try to find the resting place of Jane Bowles' parrot, walking through a Moroccan market, or examining his elderly face in a mirror, Nutting's
camera has captured a man confronting, living, and reflecting upon a life that happens to have been among the most remarkable of the twentieth-century.
In these photographs Nutting's capture of Bowles' elusive personality is reflected by the varied character of the work. The prints are both large and intimate, formal and informal, and use platinum, silver gelatin, and hand
coloring techniques to reveal the subjects' complex character. The exhibition takes its name from the book in which much of the work appears, Yesterday's Perfume: An Intimate Memoir of Paul Bowles, a collaborative work
containing Nutting's written memoir of her friendship with Bowles and previously unpublished writings by him.
Yesterday's Perfume was published by Clarkson Potter in 2000. Cherie Nutting's work has appeared in many major publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Interview, and Index and has been exhibited
both in the United States and Switzerland. She has produced cover photography for a number of world music albums and was additional music coordinator for Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Sheltering Sky", David Cronenberg's
"Naked Lunch", and the BBC film "The Rolling Stones in Morocco." Nutting received an NEH grant in 1980 for Barely Time to Play, a photographic study of young girls in Duvaliers' Haiti. She has studied photography at the
New England School of Photography and at New York's School of Visual Arts and lives in New York City.
Paul Bowles was born in 1910 and died in 1999. While living the life of a writer in Europe as a young man, Gertrude Stein suggested that he was not a poet after which he studied with Aaron Copland and established himself as
a distinguished American composer. Contrary to Stein's comment, he also became an important writer of such works as the classic novel The Sheltering Sky. In the 1940s he and his wife Jane Bowles retreated from what
they saw as the materialism of Western society to Tangiers where they lived two of the most extraordinary lives of the twentieth century. To learn more about Paul Bowles, please visit the official website, www.paulbowles.org.
Artist's book available, please inquire:
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Cherie Nutting
Yesterday's Perfume: An Intimate Portrait of Paul Bowles
by Cherie Nutting and Paul Bowles
2000, Clarkson Potter Publishers, Crown Publishing Group, 240 pages
Hardcover, $75
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