Available Copies from Independent Booksellers
Price: US$2000.00 + shipping
Description: Grey wraps with lettering on covers, blank spine. Bound sheets are uncut, 50 numbered pages. cover page for Dyer and two photographs, 13 pp. ads (3) 10 photograph plates. Preface page is followed by a listing of the 6 George Davison photographs; then the photographs on thin sheets. These are followed by an article "Symbolism and Allegory by Charles H. Caffin. The next article is Pictorial Photography by R. Demachy (reprinted from R. Child Bailey's "The Complete Photographer). This is followed by a poem by J.B. Kerfoot "The A B C of Photography." This is followed by a listing and presentation of 2 photographs by Sarah C. Sears. These are followed by The Editors Page, which goes on for two pages. On page 39, we next have an article titled The Straight and the Modified Print (reprinted from The Amateur Photographer, London) by Robert Demachy. A lengthy (but unsigned) article about Mr. Demachy entitled "Mondieur Demachy and English Photographic Art (again, reprinted from Amateur Photographer, London) follows this. Next is a short single-page article Photo-secession Notes, on the other side of the sheet is found "Our Illustrations" which explains the processes and printers of the issue's illustrations. This is followed by a listing of and presentation of two photographic plates by William B. Dyer, which are followed by 8 sheets with ads presented on 13 sides of the 16 possible. Photographic titles as follows: George Davison's "The Onion Field--1890," "In a Village under the South Downs," "A Thames Locker," "Wyvenhoe on the Colne in Essex," "The Long Arm," and "Berkshire Teams and Teamsters" * Sarah C. Sears' "Mrs. Julia Ward Howe" and "Mary" * William B. Dyer's "The Spider" and "L'Allegro." VG or better, very clean inside, wrappers are lightly worn much better than typically seen.
Seller: Mullen Books, ABAA, Marietta, PA, U.S.A.
Price: US$2500.00 + shipping
Condition: Very Good
Description: Folio. 50pp. [16 pages including additional plates and publisher's ads]. Original grey paper wrappers with white lettering on the covers, specially mounted on grey cloth boards for Stieglitz. Dated April, 1907. Cover design by Eduard Steichen. This is issue #18 of the seminal quarterly art photography publication edited and published by pioneering photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). It contains a total of 10 photographic plates by photographers George Davison (1854-1930), Sarah Choate Sears (1858-1935), and Chicago photographer William B. Dyer (1860-1931). Davison was a founding member of the Linked Ring photographic society, which is seen as the British counterpart of American Photo-Secession movement. Also included are various essays and articles on photography from a number of notable and historically important contributors to the field, including photographers and art critics, many of whom were members of or associated with the Photo-Secession. Included here are 6 images by Davison; his famous landscape "The Onion Field" (1890), "In A Village Under the South Downs", "A Thames Locker", "Wyvenhoe on the Colne in Essex", "The Long Arm" and "Berkshire Teams and Teamsters". Sarah Coate Sears contributes the expressive portraits "Mrs. Julia Ward Howe" and "Mary". William B. Dyer contributes the nude studies "The Spider" and "L'Allegro". Each image is beautifully reproduced from the original photograph in b/w or sepia-toned photogravure, and printed on tissue paper. Text content includes "Symbolism and Allegory" by art critic Charles H. Caffin (1854-1918), "Pictorial Photography" (reprinted from The Complete Photographer) by R. Child Bayley, a poem about photography by J.B. Kerfoot (1865-1927), "The Straight and Modified Print" by French pictorial photographer Robert Demachy (1859-1936), and an essay on Demachy's work with contributions from George Bernard Shaw as well as British photographers Frederick H. Evans (1853-1943), and Francis Meadow Sutcliffe (1853-1941). The final section of 13 unnumbered pages contain beautifully-printed period advertisements for photography-related businesses. Binding with some minor rubbing, and light bumping to extremities. Spine sunned with light bumping and rubbing to the head and tail. Back cover bumped with creasing along the bottom. Interior with the pages between the initial list of Davison plates at the front and p.18 loosening from the book block but not fully detached. Plates all clean and vibrant overall with some having minor to light foxing, mostly in the margins. Binding and interior in very good- condition overall. * Agnes Ernst Meyer (1887-1970) was an American journalist, philanthropist, civil rights activist, and art patron. She was a close collaborator and friend of photographer Alfred Stieglitz, with whom she publishing the arts and literary magazine "291" (from 1915-916). She first encountered the work of photo-secession group, when she chanced upon Stieglitz's Gallery 291, while work as a reporter for the New York Sun newspaper. She was one of the first female journalists to work at the paper. Due to this fact Stieglitz often referred to her as the "Sun Girl". Along with Katharine Rhoades and Marion Beckett she was known as the one of "The Three Graces" of the Alfred Stieglitz artistic circle. She is well known for her political activism throughout her life on behalf many causes, including public education and racial equality in America.
Seller: ERIC CHAIM KLINE, BOOKSELLER (ABAA ILAB), Santa Monica, CA, U.S.A.
Price: US$2875.00 + shipping
Description: 12 x 8.5, wraps, 43 pp + plates + ads. Covers edge-chipped, spine chipping, contents a bit toned else a nice, clean copy in custom plexiglass box. WITH FOUR PHOTOGRAVURES AND TWO HALF-TONE PLATES BY JOSEPH T. KEILEY, TWO PHOTOGRAVURES BY F. BENEDICT HERZOG, AND ONE PHOTOGRAVURE EACH BY HARRY C. RUBIAM AND A. RADCLYFFE DUGMORE. Plus illustrations by J. Montgomery Flagg.
Seller: John K King Used & Rare Books, Detroit, MI, U.S.A.
STIEGLITZ, Alfred.. The Steerage.. printed between 1911 and 1915, 1907.
Price: US$15125.00 + shipping
Description: Small format photogravure on Japanese tissue paper, (192 x 152 mm), mounted (size with mount 367 x 299 mm). In June 1907, Stieglitz and his family sailed to Europe to visit relatives and friends. They booked 1st class tickets on the SS Kaiser Wilhelm II, one of the largest and fastest ships in the world at that time. According to Stieglitz, sometime after their third day of travel, he went for a walk around the ship and came upon a viewpoint that looked down toward the lower class passengers area, known on most ships as the steerage. The scene Stieglitz captured is in fact a cultural document of an important period when many immigrants were coming to America. But this photo was taken on a cruise going to Europe from America, and so the poor people captured in the photo were most likely those who were turned away by U.S. Immigration officials and were forced to go back to Europe. Although some of the passengers might have been rejected immigrants, turned back because of failure to meet financial or health requirements for entrance, it is also likely that many of them were various artisans who worked in the booming U.S. construction trade of the time. Workers who were highly skilled in crafts such as cabinetmaking, woodworking and marble laying were granted two-year temporary visas to complete their jobs and then returned to their homelands when the work was complete. A son of German Jewish immigrants, Stieglitz perhaps recognised himself in those people of the lower deck. The Steerage began its life as a masterpiece four years after its creation, with Stieglitz's publication of it in a 1911 issue of Camera Work devoted exclusively to his photographs in the 'new' style, together with a Cubist drawing by Picasso. Stieglitz loved to recount how the great painter had praised the collage-like dispersal of forms and shifting depths of The Steerage. Canonised retroactively, the photograph allowed Stieglitz to put his chosen medium on par with the experimental European painting and sculpture he imported and exhibited at his gallery. Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was a major force in the promotion and elevation of photography as a fine art in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Steerage is considered Stieglitz's signature work, and was proclaimed by the artist and illustrated in histories of the medium as his first 'modernist' photograph. It marks Stieglitz's transition away from painterly prints of Symbolist subjects to a more straightforward depiction of quotidian life. Stieglitz, Camera Work 36.
Seller: Shapero Rare Books, London, United Kingdom