Roman Hours
Roman Hours is the first publication in collaboration between writer André Aciman and photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron. The idea for this project grew out of a series of conversations between the two authors and their shared desire to capture Rome.
The book brings together a selection of images that, put together, offer a reflection on the contradictions, colours and sounds of Rome, where the ancient is glimpsed through the modern and the bright colours fade into the characteristic ocher tones of the Eternal City. Despite each author documented the city separately, it is in the conversation that arises between texts and images where their impressionist portrait of the city becomes visible and reveals itself in unexpected ways.
This clothbound, small-size publication is the first installment of the Ivorypress Cities series, which explores the vision of a place through the eyes of an artist and the words of a writer.
André Aciman was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt. He currently is a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University in New York, where he teaches the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Out of Egypt (1994), False Papers (2000), Eight White Nights (2010), Alibis (2011), Harvard Square (2013), Enigma Variations (2017), Find Me (2019) and Call Me By Your Name (2007), which was adapted to film by Luca Guadagnino in 2017 to critical acclaim.
He was the recipient of the Lambda Literary Award in 2007 for Call me by your Name, and received the Whiting Award in 1995 for Out of Egypt.
Jeannette Montgomery Barron was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and studied at the International Center of Photography in New York. She became known for her portraits of the New York art world in the 1980s, which were later published in Jeannette Montgomery Barron (1989). Her next book, Photographs and Poems (1998), was a collaboration with the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham. Mirrors (2004) includes a text by the celebrated author Edmund White. She has also published Session with Keith Haring (2006), twenty photographs taken in Haring’s studio one afternoon in 1985, My Mother’s Clothes (2010), and My Years in the 1980s New York Art Scene (2015), among others.
She has shown her work at Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich; Scalo, New York and Zurich; Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta; Patrick Parrish Gallery, New York; Staley-Wise Gallery, New York; ClampArt, New York; and Magazzino D’Arte Moderna, Rome. Her works are included in public and corporate collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Kunsthaus, Zurich; the Cy Twombly Foundation Archive, Rome; and The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, among others.