Jonathan Becker: Lost Time Documents Five Decades of Photographing High Society

Published by Phaidon, the photo book features 200 photographs from a master photographer.

Written by The Editors of NUVO

Jonathan Becker is a portrait photographer with great artistic cachet. After writing about Brassaï in a surrealism class at Harvard, Becker was mentored by the French Hungarian multidisciplinary in Paris before becoming a longtime contributor to many magazines, including Vanity Fair, in the 1980s.

Over 200 of his photographs are now collected in one volume, Jonathan Becker: Lost Time, published by global publishing house Phaidon. It features works spanning five decades of Becker’s illustrious career of editorial and personal work, most of which were never previously published. A compelling retrospective, Lost Time is his social study of prominent figures from a time he refers to as a bygone era.

Edited by Mark Holborn, the book shows the authenticity of Becker’s subjects and their surroundings as he chronicles them in their studios, homes, and parties. Lost Time includes images of Andy Warhol, Nicole Kidman, Calvin Klein, Léa Seydoux, Frank Sinatra, Gloria Vanderbilt, Peter Beard, Fran Lebowitz, Arthur Miller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cindy Sherman, André Leon Talley, Gore Vidal, Diana Vreeland, and David Bowie, among many others. A first monograph for the photographer, Lost Time also features a brief autobiography written by Becker, whose photographs document his time in New York, Paris, London, and Buenos Aires from the 1970s to the 2010s.

Jonathan Becker: Lost Time. Edited by Mark Holborn, texts by Jonathan Becker and Mark Holborn. Courtesy of Phaidon.

Holborn, a book designer and editor who has worked with photographers and artists such as Lucian Freud, Issey Miyake, and William Eggleston, has also curated the companion exhibition at the Katonah Museum of Art (on display until January 26, 2025).