Rare Birds

Rare Birds, the first monograph by Amanda de Cadenet, is a ten-year retrospective documenting the provocative cast of characters she has encountered through the course of her life and travels. These intimate images, published here for the first time, present us with a disarming array of personalities. Defying superficial interpretation and representation, Rare Birds humanizes our pop culture idols, placing them alongside equally compelling people from everyday life.

Be it her daughter Atlanta, her boyfriend Nick, friends Keanu Reeves, Tobey Macguire, Benicio del Toro, Drew Barrymore, Orlando Bloom, Mischa Barton, Amber Valletta, Sophie Dahl, Amanda Peet, Dave Gahan, Jenny Saville, Beck, Sean Lennon, Kings of Leon, The Strokes, The Vines, Adam Green of The Moldy Peaches, and Brody Dalle of The Distillers, or the odd and unusual people she encounters on the street, Amanda de Cadenet’s photographs capture a subtle, ambiguous, and unconventional beauty.

Amanda de Cadenet began her eclectic career in London at age fourteen as the host of a successful talk show, and later relocated to Los Angeles to raise her daughter and pursue acting. After starring in several films it became apparent that life behind the camera was what motivated de Cadenet. She promptly began to capture the cast of characters surrounding her with a secondhand Leica M6, and a new career began to take shape. Today, de Cadenet’s portraits and fashion images appear in such publications as Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, i-D, Allure, Spin, and Rolling Stone. Currently residing in New York with her daughter and boyfriend, she is working on directing her first film.

Marc Jacobs is the Artistic Director for Louis Vuitton and designer for the Marc Jacobs and Marc by Marc Jacobs lines. He was the youngest designer ever to be awarded the Council of Fashion Designers of America Perry Ellis Award for New Fashion Talent in 1987, and has since received six more CFDA awards including Women’s Designer of the Year for his fabled Grunge Collection, Accessories Designer of the Year, and Menswear Designer of the Year. He recently launched a fourth fragrance, Blush by Marc Jacobs, and runs more than fifty stores worldwide. Jacobs lives between Paris and New York.

Sophie Dahl was born in England and grew up in both London and New York. Dahl has been an internationally renowned model for the past ten years. She is the author of the novella The Man with the Dancing Eyes (Bloomsbury, 2003), which has been translated into many languages. Dahl has contributed to magazines and newspapers including Vogue, The Telegraph, and The Times of London, as well as the anthology Truth or Dare (Picador, 2004). She lives in New York, where she is currently writing her first novel.