Life Is Good & Good For You In New York.[Album Petite Planète 1]. Hardcover - 1956

[Roto-Sadaq, Geneva for] Editions du Seul Album Petite Planete 1 & Photography Magazine, France & London, 1956 First Edition. 192 printed pages of full-page duotone photographic illustrations. The 14 page, staple-bound, satirical, promotional, pamphlet bookmark -attached by the original short length of black cord- is present (some mild creasing at bottom and slight toning). 22.5 x 28.5 cm. Original blackcloth. Gold lettering on spine (slightly faded) and on upper cover. Very slightly worn at head of spine, but overall in very good condition. One of the most scarce, most important, & most sought after titles in photographic literature of the late twentieth century, it is regarded as one of the most influential and groundbreaking photo-books. Published in 1956, its visual energy captured the rough-and-tumble streets of New York, a city Klein once described as "the world capital of anguish", like no photo-book had done before or since. Robert Capa famously declared that if your photographs were no good it was because you were not close enough to your subject, and in Klein's New York people press themselves up against the lens, dance around it, pull faces, pretend to shoot each other, a visual chaos that is rigorously organized by Klein's one American eye and one European eye, as he once characterized his style. (Roth 101). This is the French Edition, which is the true first edition of this book. The title page, contents page and two pages of text at the back of the book are in English and French. In an interview in the January 2013 issue of Sight & Sound magazine Klein recounts: Well, I didn t know how to do a book. I was just discovering photography and once I had all these pictures, I showed them to editors in New York and nobody thought it was worthwhile to do a book with these photographs. They said, What is this shit? I came back to Paris and discovered there was a series of travel books called Petite Planète. I called them up and got an appointment and I went to this office which looked like NASA. Chris Marker was there with a laser gun in his belt, and he saw the photographs and said, We ll do a book! In fact he said, We ll do a book or I quit! This was the first of several collaborations, Klein and his wife Janine later appeared as men of the future in Marker s seminal film La Jetée (1962), with Klein providing the English narration. Life Is Good & Good For You In New York represents Kleins attempt to capture the kinetic quality of 1950s New York as he saw it, the noise, the dirt and the madness. Rejecting traditional ideas of sharpness, brightness, and composition, Klein also experimented with the layout: having use of the Vogue darkrooms and access to their Photostat machine allowed him to try many ideas, cutting and pasting and playing with scale and sequencing quickly and easily. Traditional photography books put me to sleep. They were untouchable, academic, and boring. For me, design, graphics, and layout were almost as important as the photographs themselves. And thats why I did everything I could to create a new kind of visual book. Klein along with Robert Frank were the principal progenitors of street photography.. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/No Jacket.