BALLET [104 Photographs by Alexey Brodovitch]
Alexey Brodovitch
Alexey Brodovitch: BALLET [104 Photographs by Alexey Brodovitch]. New York: J. J. Augustin, 1945. First edition [limited to 500 copies, though allegedly far fewer were produced, most were distributed as gifts]. Oblong quarto. Plain boards with cloth spine. Fitted and attached printed dust jacket [as issued]. Publishers slipcase. 144 pp. 104 gravure reproductions. 12 elaborate typographic segment dividers. Text by Edwin Denby. Penciled gift inscription on front free endpaper. One-eighth-inch nick to the lower edge of page 125/6 with no loss. Form-fitted jacket worn and splitting along front bottom edge. Spine heel and crown lightly split and chipped. Front corners rubbed, and rear panel lightly marked from handling. The uncoated jacket was designed to add strength to the fragile book construction by completely covering the boards and was pasted onto itself at the outer flaps. The previously unknown Publishers slipcase is cardboard covered with a wood-patterned paper veneer with tipped-on printed panels to front and spine mirroring Brodovitch's elegant Title typography. The faux-wood slipcase recalls the sidestage fringes where Brodovitch photographed the dancers. One edge splitting with a vintage tape repair and expected wear overall. A very good copy housed in a fair to good example of a previously unrecorded slipcase.
BALLET is the rare title sanctified by unanimous inclusion in the holy trinity of PhotoBook Agenda Setters: THE BOOK OF 101 BOOKS [Roth et al], THE OPEN BOOK [Hasselblad Center], and THE PHOTOBOOK: A HISTORY Volume 1 [Parr & Badger].
"The picture represents the feelings and point of view of the intelligence behind the camera. This disease of our age is boredom and a good photographer must combat it. The way to do this is by invention -- by surprise. When I say a good picture has surprise value I mean that it stimulates my thinking and intrigues me. The best way to achieve surprise quality is by avoiding cliches. Imitation is the greatest danger of the young photographer.
--Alexey Brodovitch, 1964
11.25 x 8.75 book with 144 pages, 104 full-page gravure plates and 11 elaborate typographic segment dividers: Les Noces, Les Cent Baisers, Symphonie Fantastique, Le Tricorne, Boutique Fantasque, Cotillion, Choreartum, Septieme Symphonie, Le Lac des Cygnes, Les Sylphides and Concurrence. Brodovitch photographed several of the leading Russian ballet companies whilst they were in New York on their world tours between 1935 and 1937. The contents are divided into eleven segments, one for each ballet performance. On the contents page, Brodovitch introduces each chapter in a typographic style that emulates the feel of the dance it is describing.
"When you first glance at them, Alexey Brodovitch's photographs look strangely unconventional. Brodovitch, who knows as well as any of us the standardized Fifth Ave kind of flawless prints, offers us, as his own, some that are blurred, distorted, too black and spectral, or too light and faded looking, and he has even intensified these qualities in souvenirs, and he first took them to have a souvenir of ballet to keep. From the wings, from standing room, watching the performance, absorbed by a sentiment it awakened, he snapped, one may imagine, almost at random. But as you look at his results you come to see that he was steadily after a very interesting and novel subject. He was trying to catch the elusive stage atmosphere that only ballet has, as the dancers in action created it."
--Edwin Denby
"Brodovitch's signature use of white space, his innovation of Bazaar's iconic Didot logo, and the cinematic quality that his obsessive cropping brought to layouts (not even the work of Man Ray and Henri Cartier-Bresson was safe from his busy scissors) compelled Truman Capote to write, "What Dom Perignon was to champagne . . . so [Brodovitch] has been to . . . photographic design and editorial layout."
-- Jenna Gabrial Gallagher, Harper's Bazaar, 2007
"The legendary Brodovitch dominated New York fashion and photography during the 1940s and 50s from his powerful position as art director and graphic designer for Harper's Bazaar and through his influential workshop courses at the Design Laboratory, where he taught aspects of photography and graphic design. Among his now-famous followers were Richard Avedon, Lisette Model and Garry Winogrand. In his teaching, his magazine layouts and his photography he reveled in breaking all of the rules that had controlled the more static American photographic scene of the pre-War era. Ballet has been described as 'The first photobook to prefigure or set out a photographic approach to this [US post-War stream-of-consciousness] artistic and cultural upheaval'. In it, Brodovitch reproduced a series of photographs he had made of visiting Ballets Russes companies' performances in New York during the period 1935 - 37. . .
" . . . Using a 35mm camera without flash he had worked with, rather than against, the inevitable blurred and grainy results to create photographs that are full of drama and life. This dynamic is maintained throughout the pages of the book, where the full bleed images run on from one to another in a filmic continuum. 'Ballet 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."
-- Parr & Badger, THE PHOTOBOOK Volume I, pp. 235 & 240.