Then is the record of a remarkable life and the people with whom it was lived. Spies, fashion designers, aristocrats, dancers, editors, publishers, and Nobel laureates come and go in this photographic chronicle of half a century. The cast of characters includes Baryshnikov, Brodsky, Braque, Chanel, Raymond Lowey, Picasso, Dior, Horowitz, Jasper Johns, Truman Capote, Babe and Bill Paley, Irving Penn, and many other talented friends and family members.

Alexander Liberman began taking photographs as a boy in revolutionary Moscow, and he has kept his camera with him throughout his life. He is a distinguished sculptor and painter, but has also spent much of his life making magazines. As he notes in his introduction, perhaps a million photographs - other people's photographs - have passed under his discerning gaze. "I look at a sheet of contacts for the unplanned, unpremeditated vision," Liberman says.

Most of his own photographs were unplanned, in that they were taken to document a moment, but they reveal a life full of charm and valor and creative energy, and a time that shaped the world we know now.