MEXIKO
AUKUNST - LANDSCHAFT - VOLKSLEBEN
Hugo Brehme
Hugo Brehme: MEXIKO: BAUKUNST - LANDSCHAFT - VOLKSLEBEN. Berlin, Verlag von Ernst Wasmuth, 1925. First edition [Orbis Terrarum series]. Text in German, with captions in Spanish, German, and English. Quarto. Emerald cloth embossed and stamped in gold. Kraft paper dust jacket letterpressed in black with tipped on gravure print. Publishers decorated shipping carton. xx, 256 pp. 256 gravure plates. Introduction by Walther Staub. Jacket lightly worn with a couple of subtle tape reinforcements. Shipping carton lightly edgeworn with bruised corners. A fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket. Rare thus.
First edition. Expanded and refocused edition of Brehme's MEXICO PINTORESCO from 1923. Brehem used his German connections to produce this lavish edition in Berlin, as part of the publishers' Orbis Terrarum series. Ernst Wasmuth also produced Karl Blossfeldt's URFORMEN DER KUNST. It was possible to finance such a finely-printed edition abroad only because the German economy was in a shambles after World War I. The record inflation rate gave the peso an unheard-of buying power.
Olivier Debroise characterized Brehme as "both the first modern photographer of Mexico and the last representative of its old guard and of a certain nineteenth-century vision." Working in Mexico from 1905 until his death in 1954, he was an early mentor to Mexico's most famous photographer, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and a significant influence on Golden Age filmmakers Gabriel Figueroa and Emilio "El Indio" Fernandez. Brehme-esque imagery even appears in the work of American filmmaker John Ford and Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.
". . . the book titled MEXICO: BAUKUNST, LANDSCHAFT, VOLKSLEBEN (Mexico: Architecture, Landscape, Popular Life) was published in Germany in 1925, part of Wasmuth's Orbis Terrarum series of photographic books of the world. This volume was also published in Spanish, French, and English editions, the latter titled Picturesque Mexico, causing confusion with regard to the 1923 Mexican book. A comparison of the photographs and structure of these books reflects the different interests of their target audiences: tourists and sophisticated readers in Mexico City for the 1923 volume and Europeans and U.S. readers outside the country for the 1925 book. Although there is some overlap, the German edition contains more photographs and a single text, scientific in tone, by a German professor. Greater emphasis is placed on the volcanoes and pre-Columbian civilizations, less on Mexico City, and none on the tipos.
". . . Brehme's postcards and photographs disseminated his vision of Mexico far and wide and made a significant contribution to the promotion of tourism, an important and growing sector of the Mexican economy in that period." -- Susan Toomey Frost