Irina Ionesco was born to Romanian parents in Paris, 1935. At the age of four she was separated from them and spent her formative years in the city of Constanza, Romania. Steeped in that city’s fabulous riches and fascinating traditions, she returned to Paris first to dance, then to paint, and finally to find her true vocation as photographer of the bizarre and beautiful as they are evoked in women’s erotic mysteries.  
  
Ionesco was elected “Woman of the Year”, Time Life Books, 1977, and has over 12 books and countless international exhibitions to her credit. Irina Ionesco currently lives and works in Paris. 

In 1965 the esteemed photographer Irina Ionesco began photgraphing her young daughter, Eva Ionesco. Thus began a collaboration which culminated in this extraordinary testament to the beauty of a girl child as witnessed through the lens of her mother’s eye. Never before in the history of photography has an artist of this magnitude photographed her child to such stunning effect. Weaving threads of baroque orientalism, gothic eroticism and surrealist fantasy, these mysterious images might well be controversial, but only if removed from the crucible of “dark love” which so ably contains and ferments them. Ionesco insists “The liberty I took in baring her is innocent….in my gaze the greatest love of all took place” Ionesco’s photographs of her daughter Eva have been widely acclaimed since the 1970’s. “EVA: Eloge de ma Fille” gathers 124 of these images into the definitive volume of Eva photgraphs. (via listal.com)

The book.