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122 Colour Photographs

Sale price£750.00

,

3
pages






  • Schoenberg, 1948
  • Hardcover in jacket
  • 132 pages
  • Text in English and Danish
  • Condition: Very Good

While the rise of color photography as a viable artistic medium has often been credited to the celebrated work of Willam Eggleston and Stephen Shore in the 1970s, their efforts had in fact been preceded by almost two decades by the Danish photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen (born 1920). Helmer-Petersen’s 1948 publication of 122 Colour Photographs stands as an extraordinary accomplishment: inspired by the realism of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, Helmer-Petersen concentrated on the mundane and the everyday, generating a panoply of geometric abstractions out of curved doorknobs, crates of tomatoes, industrial metal drums and straw-colored buildings against milky blue skies. With this reproduction, accompanied by an essay by historian Mette Sandbye, 122 Colour Photographs can at last assume its proper role as the foundational book that successfully put color photography on the map and brought modernism into Danish photography.


Noted in Parr / Badger, The Photobook: A History (p202) and also Books on Books #14 from Errata Editions, this book is one of the most iconic photobooks of the 20th Century. Copies are scarce, particularly in such excellent condition with the dustwrapper.


Book Condition: Very Good. Jacket shows some chipping to top edge, now in protective plastic. Some rubbing to board edges. Interior is incredibly clean and crisp considering the age of the book, with very minor ageing to some page top edges. Binding is very tight with no defects. Overall an incredibly good example of this scarce and important book.


Errata Edition available