Camp

By Philip Core

Camp style, in behaviour, clothing, artistic output or emotions, has never been properly explored or defined. Jean Cocteau, as camp a figure as Paris has ever produced, said in Vanity Fair in 1922, 'I am a lie that tells the truth.' This paradox is the basis of Philip Core's personal definitions of camp, seen from the inside. His savagely witty depictions of more than two centuries of camp find it embodied in personalities and places, objects and artefacts. He has written a Who's Who and a What's What of camp, a deceptively descriptive and factual lexicon, allowing the reader to build up a kaleidoscopic picture of camp through the ages. It is complemented with 150 rare and stunning photographs and a vivacious foreword by England's foremost authority on surrealism, eccentric behaviour and hats - jazz singer George Melly.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0859650448
• ISBN13: 9780859650441
• Release Date: March 1996
• Publisher: Plexus Publishing (UK)
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

The Insider's Guide

This is an amusing, cheeky introduction to a much maligned sensibility. Today's tell-all world sees camp as largely a quaintly archaic coping mechanism of yore; this book, with its provocative photos, sly, gossipy text, and astonishing breadth of subject, makes one wish it were not so. For here the flamboyant shares the stage with the subtly subversive. Where else could one find Hemingway and Oscar Wilde sharing equal billing? Where else could the Bright Young Things of 1920's England find themselves in close proximity to the rock group the Kinks? This book offers the kind of sophisticated, flashy wit, dreamy sensuousness, and naughty kinks that are in scant supply in our overblown, overexplicit, media-mad world nowadays. Camp is not dead, as some have proclaimed, but only waiting for the right moment to assert its subversive influence. Philip Core is the pied piper who will show us the way.