Chess Players

A photobook dedicated to players throughout time who have tried their hand at the beloved cerebral game, featuring text penned by chess enthusiast and acclaimed author Martin Amis

This is a book for chess Grandmasters, novices and inquiring laymen alike. It is a book for anyone who has wondered, as Martin Amis wryly asks in his contributing text, “What are they playing at?”

Marcel Duchamp’s iconic quote, “All chess players are artists,” resonates throughout the volume. David Hockney likened the game’s strategic thinking to that of making art: “Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.” “Chess is war over the board,” said Bobby Fischer, Grandmaster and World Chess Champion, but here John Lennon and Yoko Ono checkmate this notion, with their all-white chess “peace” set.

Chess Players: From Charlie Chaplin to Wu-Tang Clan compiles photographs of notable figures playing the beloved game of strategy over the course of 130 years. The volume strings together zany and remarkable moments in time. In one image, players are captured on board a steamship crossing the Atlantic in 1888; in another, an astronaut studies a board in space. And, as the title suggests, Hollywood celebrities frequent the book’s pages, playing chess on and off the screen: Humphrey Bogart deploys a Sicilian Defense against Lauren Bacall, while Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen plot their next gambit in the iconic chess seduction scene from The Thomas Crown Affair (1968).

Featuring an introduction by Dylan Loeb McClain, former chess columnist for the New York Times, the photographs in Chess Players evince the enduring attraction of this cerebral game. The volume also features an interview with Viswanathan Anand, who is inarguably one of the greatest chess players in history.