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First edition, first printing. Soft cover. White stiff wrappers with photographically illustrated dust jacket. Photographs by Christopher Wool. Designed by Hans Werner Holzwarth and Christopher Wool. 328 pp., with black-and-white plates throughout. 11 x 8-1/2 inches. [Cited in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Volume III. (London and New York: Phaidon, 2014)]. Out of print. New in publisher's shrink-wrap. A flawless copy. From the publisher: "Between 1994 and 1995, Christopher Wool shot a series of photographs in downtown New York City that he calls East Broadway Breakdown, after a street on the Lower East Side, the neighborhood where he lives and works. Taken at night using a 35mm camera, the pictures feature the neighborhood's signature streets, with their dilapidated storefronts and ramshackle staircases leading up to anonymous spaces. The high contrast images are often hard to read, producing, rather than coherent images, seemingly random forms that emerge from skewed camera angles. Like his paintings, Wool's photographs hover between abstraction and representation, forcing viewers to confront their desire for visual coherence while offering an alternative construct for picture-making today." An excerpt from "Ghost Dog" by Anne Pontégnie ("Christopher Wool, Crosstown Crosstown"): "A succession of images in undifferentiated shades of gray that immerse the viewer in this nocturnal world. Their realism has more to do with this subjectivity dis-solved in its context than with any hypothetical truth of representation. In his paintings and photographs, Wool might associate with stray dogs, neurosis, or debris: stains, drips, and accidents of various origins, pictorial or organic. This voluntary assimilation with degrading phenomena -- another form of humor, this time, black -- is the instrument that allows him to achieve the dissolution found in these photographs and gives him access to a singular vision: one that is street level." (Anne Pontégnie, "Ghost Dog," in Christopher Wool, Crosstown Crosstown). Seller Inventory # 110286
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