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This selection of more than 700 mostly black-and-white photographs by Camilla McGrath is from a collection of 60,000 in 100 white leather bound albums covering the years 1948-1999. Camilla, one of four children of Count and Countess Pecci-Blunt, grew up with a mother who was passionate about the arts: she painted, had a small theater, an art gallery, La Cometa, in Rome, and one in New York, and collected celebrated artists, writers, dancers and choreographers who often visited Marlia, the grand palazzo they owned outside Lucca where she took pictures of them displayed at the pool house. Camilla started taking her own pictures in the late 40s. She was fluent in English and Italian since at the beginning of the war the family had fled first to Santa Barbara and later moved to 9 East 84th Street in New York where Camilla went to Spence. Once they returned to Italy, there were attempts to marry Camilla off to a well-to-do Italian but she rebelled against that life. These photographs document McGrath's life in the 50s on and off boats in the Mediterranean, at the Agnelli wedding outside Strasberg, skiing in the Italian alps or in New York with Cy Twombly to witness his marriage at City Hall. After meeting Earl McGrath in 1958 at the opening of Gian Carlo Menotti's Festival of the Two Worlds where they both were working, they would marry in 1963. Six years younger, Earl was handsome, very funny and outgoing, a survivor of a rough childhood in Wisconsin and the Merchant Mariner.

Celebrities --- Vernacular photography --- McGrath, Camilla,