Street Incidents : a series of twenty-one permanent photographs, with descriptive letter-press.

A$7,500 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

London : Sampson Low, Marston, Searle Rivington, 1881. Quarto (285 x 220 mm), publisher s pictorial red cloth stamped in gilt and black (boards with light staining and flecking, spine sunned and flecked, text block a little sprung), original patterned endpapers, pp [2], [1]-100, with 21 original woodburytypes from Thomson s original dry-plate negatives, each with printed caption and red ruled border, mounted as individual plates on the rectos of the leaves between pages 3 and 43; all of the woodburytpes and their page mounts are in superb condition, without fading or foxing; title page and last page of text with browning (as in other examples), upper margins of a few text pages with mild insect damage, hinges cracked but holding. The first use of published photographs as social documentary. In 1877-78 John Thomson had first collaborated with radical socialist writer Adolphe Smith Headingley in creating 36 photographs accompanied by textual commentary for the monthly parts of Street Life in London . Of this collaboration John Hannavy, in The Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography , wrote: The bringing together of the photographer John Thomson and the left-wing political writer and activist Adolphe Smith Headingley to work on the project which resulted in Street Life of London (1877-78), was a logical progression from the collaboration between Richard Beard and Henry Mayhew more than two decades earlier on Mayhew s study of London Labour and the London Poor. Headingley,

• Binding: Hardcover

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