Richard Avedon, Truman Capote - Observations (FIRST BOOK, FIRST AMERICAN PRINTING) - 1959

LANDMARK FIRST BOOK AND EARLY MASTERPIECE by the just 36-years-young, later legendary American photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004) - with his best photos till the end of the fifties.

In GENIOUS COOPERATION with later very famous American author Truman Capote (1924-1984).

Andrew Roth, The Book of 101 Books, page 148/149.

A striking collection of full-bleed black and white images - in FANTASTIC, BREATH-TAKING printing.
HERE IN THE TRUE FIRST ORIGINAL AMERICAN EDITION from 1959 (the title was published also in other countries same time).

SUPER FRESH BOOK -
COMPLETE with the OFTEN MISSING glassine jacket and with the SCARCE ORIGINAL SLIPCASE.

Welcome to the next edition of the very popular one-seller auctions by Ecki Heuser, 5Uhr30.com (Cologne, Germany) - on Catawiki. We are offering some of the best international photobooks ever published.
We guarantee: detailed and accurate descriptions, 100% protection, 100% insurance and combined shipping worldwide.

The book shows great portraits of:
Pablo Picasso, Andre Gide, The Duke and Dutchess of Windsor, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Cocteau, Mae West and Marilyn Monroe.

Simon and Schuster Publishers, New York. 1959. First American edition, first printing.

Hardcover with slipcase. 275 x 370 mm. 152 pages. Photographs: Richard Avedon, Comments: Truman Capote. Printed in Lucerne, Switzerland, by Camera Publishers, C.J. Bucher. Typography by Typographic Craftsmen, New York City. Text in English.

Condition:
Book inside extrem fresh and flawless, like new and unread; clean with no marks and with no foxing. Book outside very fresh and much better than usual with light trace of use only; some little stains at the top of the rear side. Extrem fragile and often missing glassine jacket present, but with bigger missing parts at the top of the front and of the rear side. Slipcase complete with no tears and with no missing parts, but with some trace of use; a bit stained, neat imperfection at the top right corner of the front. Overall fine, better than usual condition.

Highly impressive, early photobook object by American photography legend Richard Avedon -
complete with jacket and slipcase.

Richard Avedon is famous for many excellent photobooks like "Nothing Personal" or "The American West" (Martin Parr, The Photobook, vol 2, page 38).

"Richard Avedon (1923–2004) was born and lived in New York City. His interest in photography began at an early age, and he joined the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) camera club when he was twelve years old. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he co-edited the school’s literary magazine, The Magpie, with James Baldwin. He was named Poet Laureate of New York City High Schools in 1941.
Avedon joined the armed forces in 1942 during World War II, serving as Photographer’s Mate Second Class in the U.S. Merchant Marine. As he described it, “My job was to do identity photographs. I must have taken pictures of one hundred thousand faces before it occurred to me I was becoming a photographer."
After two years of service, he left the Merchant Marine to work as a professional photographer, initially creating fashion images and studying with art director Alexey Brodovitch at the Design Laboratory of the New School for Social Research.
At the age of twenty-two, Avedon began working as a freelance photographer, primarily for Harper’s Bazaar. Initially denied the use of a studio by the magazine, he photographed models and fashions on the streets, in nightclubs, at the circus, on the beach and at other uncommon locations, employing the endless resourcefulness and inventiveness that became a hallmark of his art. Under Brodovitch’s tutelage, he quickly became the lead photographer for Harper’s Bazaar.
From the beginning of his career, Avedon made formal portraits for publication in Theatre Arts, Life, Look, and Harper’s Bazaar magazines, among many others. He was fascinated by photography’s capacity for suggesting the personality and evoking the life of his subjects. He registered poses, attitudes, hairstyles, clothing and accessories as vital, revelatory elements of an image. He had complete confidence in the two-dimensional nature of photography, the rules of which he bent to his stylistic and narrative purposes. As he wryly said, “My photographs don’t go below the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.”
After guest-editing the April 1965 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Avedon quit the magazine after facing a storm of criticism over his collaboration with models of color. He joined Vogue, where he worked for more than twenty years. In 1992, Avedon became the first staff photographer at The New Yorker, where his portraiture helped redefine the aesthetic of the magazine. During this period, his fashion photography appeared almost exclusively in the French magazine Égoïste.
Throughout, Avedon ran a successful commercial studio, and is widely credited with erasing the line between “art” and “commercial” photography. His brand-defining work and long associations with Calvin Klein, Revlon, Versace, and dozens of other companies resulted in some of the best-known advertising campaigns in American history. These campaigns gave Avedon the freedom to pursue major projects in which he explored his cultural, political, and personal passions. He is known for his extended portraiture of the American Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam war and a celebrated cycle of photographs of his father, Jacob Israel Avedon. In 1976, for Rolling Stone magazine, he produced “The Family,” a collective portrait of the American power elite at the time of the country’s bicentennial election. From 1979 to 1985, he worked extensively on a commission from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, ultimately producing the show and book In the American West.
Avedon’s first museum retrospective was held at the Smithsonian Institution in 1962. Many major museum shows followed, including two at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1978 and 2002), the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (1970), the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (1985), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1994). His first book of photographs, Observations, with an essay by Truman Capote, was published in 1959. He continued to publish books of his works throughout his life, including Nothing Personal in 1964 (with an essay by James Baldwin), Portraits 1947–1977 (1978, with an essay by Harold Rosenberg), An Autobiography (1993), Evidence 1944–1994 (1994, with essays by Jane Livingston and Adam Gopnik), and The Sixties (1999, with interviews by Doon Arbus).
After suffering a cerebral hemorrhage while on assignment for The New Yorker, Richard Avedon died in San Antonio, Texas on October 1, 2004. He established The Richard Avedon Foundation during his lifetime."
(Richard Avedon foundation's website)