The visual world is filled with photographs of celebrities, but some of those images rise above others with a special, undeniable warmth. Such is the case with the portraits that legendary Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt made of the luminous Italian film star Sophia Loren from the early 1960s to the late 1970s. During that time. the pair achieved a remarkable rapport based on trust. "When I met Eisie," Loren once recalled, "it was really a love at first sight. He became my shadow." Of the thousands of pictures of Loren that Eisenstaedt shot, very few ever made it into print. Now Taschen has brought out "Sophia by Eisenstaedt," a collectors edition book featuring nearly 200 of his photographs, the majority unpublished.

  Peter Kuper is, luckily, an artist who needs no introduction. I say this because his long and varied career is impossible to summarize in a paragraph. Whether celebrating his life-long fascination with the universe of bugs, in Insectopolis, or satirizing the political nature of human inhumanity in World War III Illustrated, Peter’s work begins with research—scientific, literary, political, psychological and you name it. For this reason, I asked him to share his...