Ballet by Alexey Brodovitch (8 results)

Hardcover. Condition: New. Alexey Brodovitchâs Ballet is a legend â" one of the most influential and coveted works in the history of the photobook, but so rare that many connoisseurs have never seen a copy of the original edition, much less held it in their own hands. It has been conjured in the imagination and hinted at through documentation, but it remains more of a mystery than a reality for many.\n\nBrodovitchâs aim was to capture dance in the spontaneous, living present. Free of all artistic preconceptions and working with a sense of existential imperative, he immersed himself over a span of five years in the final performances of the Ballets Russes on tour in America. These included productions of Bronislava Nijinskaâs âLes Cents Baisersâ and âLes Noces;â George Balanchineâs âLa Concurrenceâ and âCotillon;â and Leonide Massineâs âSymphonie Fantastique,â âLe Tricorne,â âLa Boutique Fantasque,â âSeptià me Symphonie,â and âChoreartium;â as well as âLe Lac des Cygnesâ (after Petipa) and âLes Sylphidesâ (after Fokine). By the time the book was published in 1945, the arc of the revolutionary dance tradition ignited by Sergei Diaghilev and carried on by his artistic heirs had reached its end.\n\nIn Ballet, Brodovitch engaged the image and the book form in ways that continue to fascinate. Printing, however, played an equally decisive role in his experiment. He intensified the grain of his photographic film with an experimental gravure printing method that was risky and unpredictable. The improvised process required the printer to be totally engaged in the moment of creation â" analogous to a dancer in performance. His every decision and challenge would be captured on the pages. The inking and scraping mechanisms of the rotogravure press were used to mark the action of dance aggressively across the broad spreads of the book, producing images that often resemble drawings more than photographs. Stray smudges, streaks, and blotches of ink were accepted, and even embraced. Plates wore down, and ink levels fluctuated to the extreme. The exact marks left on the pages â" which might be considered flaws in a different production context â" were not as important as the fact that they were present and visible as honest and spontaneous marks of the moment of creation.\n\nOn the eve of the 80th anniversary of the publication of Ballet, Little Steidlâs reissue brings Brodovitchâs masterpiece back to life in all its material intensity with an experimental five-tone printing method developed specially for the project. The bespoke technique, which pushes the technical limits of offset-lithography to extremes, was developed and carried out by Nina Holland with the intention of reanimating not only the visual intensity of the 1945 edition, but also the risk and spontaneity of Brodovitchâs experiment. In a separate booklet accompanying the reissue, Holland and co-editor Joshua Chuang deliver a previously unknown story about the 1945 production â" drawn from their forensic study of the original edition â" that suggests Brodovitchâs artistic achievement should be viewed not just as one of the highlights, but as a singularly radical work in the history of the photographic book and printing.\n\nBallet\n104 Photographs by Alexey Brodovitch; text by Edwin Denby\nReissue of the 1945 edition\n\nAlexey Brodovitchâs Ballet was first published in 1945 in an edition of 500 by J. J. Augustin in New York. The process of reconstructing the work is discussed in detail by the editors in the accompanying text booklet.\n\nBook: hardcover (Steifbroschur) with a stitched book block, exposed coverboards, and a buckram-covered spine; French-wrap dust jacket; 28.3 x 21.6 x 2 cm; 144 pages; 104 five-tone images; text in English.\n\nHand-stitched text booklet: 28 x 21.5 cm; 16 pages; text by the editors in English.\nPortfolio box: 29.5 x 22.6 x 2.6 cm.\nTotal weight: 1.1 kg / 2.4 lbs.\n\nEditors: Nina Holland and Joshua Chuang\nDes.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. 1st Edition. This book is in very good condition for a book from 1945. All of the pages are in great condition with no damage at all. The binding of the spine is worn and a small piece of the binding is missing, but the spine is solid and all pages are still strongly attached.

First edition. Oblong hardcover. Reportedly only 500 copies were printed. Features text by Edwin Denby. This book was a revelation with it's design and gritty and grainy collection of images of the Ballet Russe. Includes 104 black and white photographs printed in gravure. A clean near fine copy in a very good plus dust jacket that has splitting to the edges of the spine and wear to the edges. Still, a nicer than usual copy of this classic. Brodovitch's importance and impact on photography and graphic design can't be overestimated. (Parr & Badger v1, 240-241, Roth 110-111).

Hardcover, dust jacket. Condition: Very Good. First edition. FIRST EDITION of Brodovitch's masterpiece; of profound influence in the history of photography and photobooks. With extremely rare original slipcase. "Although known primarily as a mentor and patron of photographers, due in large part to his position as art director and graphic designer at Harper's Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch also made a legendary photobook of his own. Ballet, published in 1945 by J J Augustin in New York, has become a photobook legend for two reasons. Firstly, only a few hundred copies were printed, so the book is more talked about than actually seen. Secondly, the volume was extremely radical, both in terms of the images themselves and their incorporation into the design and layout. "The 104 pictures in Ballet had been taken by Brodovitch between 1935 and 1937. He photographed ballet companies visiting New York, including the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, with whom he worked in Paris in the 1920s. Brodovitch shot the photographs with a 35 mm Contax camera, during both rehearsals and performances, by available light, hand-held, and using shutter speeds as slow as a fifth of a second or more. This resulted in blurred images of the moving dancers and in high-contrast, grainy negatives exhibiting burnt-out areas of flare from the stage lighting. These pictures totally violated the accepted conventions of good photographic technique, which demanded a sharp rendition of the subject and a wide, smooth tonal scale. Far from trying to mitigate these shortcomings, Brodovitch deliberately exaggerated them. He printed on high-contrast paper, bleached areas with the chemical ferricyanide to create more contrast, and enlarged tiny portions of the negative to increase grain - familiar strategies in the 1950s and 60s, but not in the 1940s. "Brodovitch's layout was as radical as his pictures. He divided the book into eleven segments, each corresponding to a ballet. Every section was laid out in a continuous strip, each image bled across its own page, so that a double-page spread can often be read as a single panorama, and the whole section like a strip of movie film. This gives the book a vibrancy and a fluidity that perfectly captures the motion of the dance. Ballet is one of the most successful attempts at suggesting motion in photography, and certainly one of the most cinematic and dynamic photobooks ever published" (Parr/Badger, Vol 1; 240-1). Roth 101. Housed in a spectacular custom box by noted book artist Sjoerd Hofstra. New York: J J Augustin, 1945. Text by Edwin Denby. 104 black and white photographs. Oblong folio (8 3/4 x 11 x 1/4 in), original boards, original French fold dust jacket; original slipcase with side missing; custom half-leather box. Dust jacket with a few small spots of soiling and light wear to spine ends; interior fine. The original slipcase is legendarily rare - this example has tape securing the label and is missing the side panel - but it is remarkable it has survived at all. An outstanding copy of one of the most beautiful and important books in the history of photography.

Hardcover. Condition: Fair to fine condition. Limited edition. 1/500. Oblong Octavo. 143pp. Original light brown, textured boards in original dust jacket; protected by modern mylar. 104 gravure plates; various decorative typefaces on table of contents; plain boards; cloth tape spine; gray printed dust jacket, French fold. Stunning photographs by Alexey Brodovitch. Text by Edwin Denby. "Though Alexey Brodovitch was famous as an art director (his Harper's Bazar stint, from 1934 to 1958, remains one of the most influential in the history of graphic design) and book designer (Richard Avedon's Observations, André Kertész's Day of Paris), he was not known as a photographer until the 1945 publication of Ballet. Critic Jane Livingstone, who drafted Brodovitch as one of the more unlikely members of what she dubbed photography's New York School, speculates that only a few hundred copies of Ballet were ever printed, and that most of them were distributed as gifts to the artist's inner circle rather than to bookstores. But if the book's audience was limited, it was also quite select, and Ballet had enormous impact among the design and photo cognoscenti. The photographs in it were taken between 1935 and 1937, beginning a year after Brodovitch's arrival in New York, and they reconnected him with one of his enduring passions: the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. In New York, he photographed the company in rehearsal, in performance, and backstage, but most of his pictures seem recovered from memory rather than recorded from life. Working with an extremely mobile 35mm camera, Brodovitch captured the ecstasy and essence of the dance in images that shift, dissolve, blur, darken impenetrably, or explode into light. He organized these photos into eleven segments by individual dances (each titled with a different typographic flourish), but the images can barely be confined to their pages much less their sources." (Roth, The Book of 101 Books, pp. 110-113). Contains index at rear. Dust jacket with some wear, some light chipping along edges but front cover detached with three and a half inch chip at tail of spine, light chipping at head. Closed tears at foredge bottom and back edge top. Some staining of front and back flaps of dust jacket. Binding with very light wear and lightly rubbed. Block lightly age-toned though not affecting images. Dust jacket in fair, binding in very good, block lightly age-toned but reproduction of photographs fine. Jacket and binding protected in modern mylar.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. A Very nice copy including the dust jacket DJ.

Boards in Dust Jacket, Boxed. Condition: Very Good -. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. First Edition. 144pp, 104 illustrations in b&w gravure. In a protective clear acetate dustwrapper. Designed by Alexey Brodovitch. "Ballet" is renowned late graphic designer Alexey Brodovitch's iconic 1945 book of photographic vignettes capturing eleven performances by The Ballets Russes between 1935 and 1937. Noted for the innovative-at-the-time use of murky shadows and blurred dancers bathed in light, these arresting images of the likes of principals Leonide Massine, Tamara Toumanova, Irina Baronova, and more are accompanied by New York poet and dance critic Edwin Denby's brief but cogent text. An internally bright, most handsome example of the first and only edition of this uncommon classic (cited on pages 240-241 of Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's "The Photobook: A History Volume I, pages 136-137 of The Hasselblad Center's "The Open Book: A History of the Photographic Book from 1878 to the Present", and pages 110-113 of "The Book of 101 Books") still in its original notoriously fragile paper dust jacket designed by Brodovitch showing a few flattened soft creases to the front pastedown along with some minor brown spotting to the endpapers. It's highly sulfurous chipboard covers are lightly age-toned with a few brown spots. The book's striking jacket is complete and intact, but lightly worn, soiled, and foxed along the extremities. It is housed in a lavish custom brown cloth over boards clamshell presentation box with pastedowns reproducing the "Ballet" logo on the front cover and spine executed by Woonsocket, Rhode Island's esteemed Dragonfly Bindery. All in all, this is a sharp, internally solid copy of one of the most lauded post-war American photography books aided by the addition of a presentation box that looks far nicer in hand than it describes. Photography Monograph.

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. 104 pages printed in gravure, 1945. Oblong hardcover.Only 500 copies reportedly printed. A Near Fine copy with the dust jacket, wrapper intact, some light soiling to covers.The fragile spine intact. Crease to ffep. Images available on request.