Juke Joint: Photographs by Imes, Birney - 1990

Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. First Edition. This is copy 22 of 100 signed by Birney Imes and Richard Ford. Acclaimed collection of photographs revealing a previously unexplored and now nearly vanished domain: the black juke joints of the Mississippi Delta. Includes approximately sixty color photographs taken between 1983 and 1989 as Imes (b.1951) traveled throughout the Delta. Many of the images are the result of long exposures that show the blur of human movement as a figure lounges at a bar or steps across a room to feed quarters into a juke box. The resulting "ghosts" animate the pictures and give them an otherworldly quality. Oblong quarto. Original black cloth binding, with blind-stamped titles. Just the slightest hint of foxing, with some mild edgewear to the publisher's pictorial slipcase. Better than very good.