Harper’s is delighted to announce Summer of 69, London-based artist Maryam Eisler’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Inaugurating this year’s summer season, the presentation features new works by Eisler and opens Saturday, May 30, 6–8pm, at Harper’s East Hampton, with a reception attended by the artist.
Summer of 69 invites the viewer into a sun-drenched reverie where vintage Pucci and worn, torn denim coexist effortlessly.
“It is a love letter to the late 60s/early 70s, an era of carefree elegance, heightened sensuality and a romanticized idea of beauty,” stated Eisler.
Though photographed in the present, the images echo a laissez-faire spirit, suspended between fantasy and memory, where glamour shimmers on the surface and untold stories quietly unfold beneath.
Woven through this nostalgic tapestry is a deliberate collision of high and low culture. Poolside romance and cocktail hours in Palm Beach sit alongside the American diner, where trailer-park beauty meets the sophisticated muse, both yearning for the same thing: to be seen, to be desired, to belong.
Morning-after scenes blend champagne flutes with sugary boxes of Lucky Charms while cigarette butts are extinguished in golden egg yolks; French eroticism slips in through visual cues referring to the iconic film Emmanuelle which defined a new era of sensuality, and the pages of LUI magazine—Jane Birkin and Brigitte Bardot gazing out from the cover—while Grace Jones Pulls Up to the Bumper!
These moments flirt with consumerism, innocence, and excess, offering stories shared with a knowing wink.
Running alongside this is the innocence of summer itself: poolside play, melting ice lollies, colorful buoys, careless dives, bodies basking under a forgiving sun. There is flirtation, a first love story, and the purity of youthful afternoons, where romance and play blur into one.
“Maryam Eisler occupies a unique space in contemporary photography," says Harper Levine. "As a natural heir to 'Good Life' photographers like Slim Aarons and Arthur Elgort, Eisler’s work in Summer of 69 both amplifies and subverts historical tropes of glamour and femininity."
Maryam Eisler is a London-based photographer and author whose photographic work is mainly centered around the Sublime Feminine. Her work has been the subject of presentations at Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York; 10 Corso Como, Milan; Alon Zakaim, London; Tristan Hoare, London; and Linley, London; as well as Harper’s, East Hampton; and Mucciaccia Gallery, Rome. She has additionally exhibited at Photo London; Eye of the Collector, London; Dallas Art Fair, Dallas; Unseen Amsterdam; Space Gallery, St Barth; Bermondsey Project Space, London; Art Marbella, Málaga, ES; MedBodrum Festival, Bodrum, TR; Sotheby’s, London; Christie’s, London; and Phillips, London. Eisler is the Chief Contributing Editor to LUX Magazine; she has also contributed photographically and editorially to Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar Art, Harper’s Bazaar Interiors, and Vogue Arabia. Co-authored with Alexei Riboud and featuring a foreword by Howard Greenberg and essay by Carrie Scott, Eisler’s catalog West West: Twin Perspectives of the American West was published in 2025. She has authored several other Thames and Hudson art titles including Voices East London (2018). Eisler has acted as creative producer to Oscar winning director Tim Yip’s Love Infinity, which debuted on Mubi in March 2022. Eisler sits on the advisory board of Photo London; she is also a nominator for the Prix Pictet prize and has held a judge position for the Louis Roederer Photography Prize for Sustainability.