Lucas Samaras was one of the great avant-garde artists of the last few decades. Renowned both for his use of fabrics and for his deployment of everyday objects in his installations, he was perhaps best known for his work in photography, where he frequently took himself as a subject. This lavishly illustrated volume is the authoritative biography of a consummate self-portraitist and a riveting depiction of a paradoxical personality: of an artist whose work in the 1960s and ’70s “prefigured the vindicated narcissism of the selfie era”, but who also showed every sign of being “a quiet and agoraphobic maverick at war with the mindset of calculated sociability”.

From his sensitive evocation of Samaras’s childhood in wartime Greece through to his perceptive interpretation of the artist’s career in the United States, Michael Skafidas has produced an outstanding account of his subject’s life and work. It is also an intriguing record of his own relationship with Samaras, and a powerful meditation on the art of life-writing.

Michael Skafidas is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Queens College, City University of New York. He holds a doctorate from the CUNY Graduate Center.