Erich Mendelsohn - Amerika (FIRST PRINTING) - 1926

EXTREM SCARCE FIRST PRINTING (not to mix with the second printing from 1928 and the later printings from 1976 and 1992); even Martin Parr mentioned the more common second printing from 1928 only.

VERY IMPORTANT GERMAN PHOTOBOOK - in fresh condition:
Martin Parr, Gerry Badger, The Photobook, volume 1, page 76/77

"Amerika . Bilderbuch eines Architekten" ("America - Picture book of an architect") -
BRILLIANT LAYOUT, EXCELLENT TYPOGRAPHY, FANTASTIC PHOTOS.

MY HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION.

The first printing was published two years before the second printing.
There were only two printings of the title:
the first came out in 1926, mentioned in the book as "first till third printing", the second came out in 1928, an enlarged edition, mentioned in the book as "different, enlarged sixth printing".
The second printing is mentioned by Gerry Badger and Martin Parr, the much more scarce first printing i am offering here.

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"In 1924 the German architect Erich Mendelsohn made an extensive trip across the United States, taking photographs of modern architecture, which he published in a popular photobook, Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (America: An Architect's Picturebook, 1925). He was a talented amateur photographer, and his images are powerfully expressive, romantic in the mode of Alfred Stieglitz, and like Stieglitz's work, a combination of the pictorial and the modernist.
Mendelsohn's opinion of the United States and American architecture expressed in the book is mixed too.
'This country gives everything: the worst of Europe, abortions of civilization, but also hopes for a new world.'
His views on American architecture were equally rigorous: 'Today the castles of commerce are still borrowed symbols of power, while their rear elevations, with their logical structure, are frequently even now surprising tokens of a true future.'
It was this emphasis on the 'true' and the 'logical' that characterized Mendelsohn as a modernist. He turned his camera not just on the facades of buildings, but also on their rears, with their accretions of fire-escape stairs.
His enquiring eye examined not just buildings, but also streetscapes, cars and passing pedestrians, as well as purely functional structures like giant billboards and the reinforced-concrete grain elevators of Buffalo that were such an inspiration to him and to other European modern architects like Le Corbusier. To postwar Europe these were not just signs of modernity but symbols of plenty.
And yet, although Mendelsohn was a thoroughly modern architect, he was essentially a pictorialist pho-tographer, albeit one who was rapidly discovering a more modernist photographic language. He was probably unconcerned with matters of photographic style, and was led to this new language through his subject matter, of which he had a highly sophisticated under-standing. He often ignored the standard etiquette of professional architectural photography, tilting his camera vertiginously. Cropping his pictures into thin verticals, he emphasized the height of the American city, demonstrating a possible familiarity with the pictorial language of Alvin Langdon Coburn or early Stieglitz. In all, this is a fascinating transitional photobook, the work of a talented amateur photographer with prior knowledge of pictorialist modes groping towards a proto-modernism as he worked."
- Gerry Badger -

Rudolf Mosse Buchverlag, Berlin, 1928. First edition, first printing.

Hardback with yellow paper with dark blue letters and with dark blue spine with yellow letters. 243 x 345 mm. 228 pages. 82 pages. 100 photos. Photos: Erich Mendelsohn. Text: Erich Mendelsohn. Text in German.

Condition:
Inside clean with no marks and with no foxing; lightly yellowed, smells a bit like smoke. Outside quiet fresh, better than usual; a bit used and yellowed. Overall fine condition.

Very scarce, very beautiful German photobook classic in the much more uncommon first printing -
extremely hard to find in any condition.