Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue (First Edition)

A$150 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books · No longer available

First edition

RICHARDS, Eugene (text Eugene Richards Edward Barnes; afterword Dr. Stephen W. Nicholas). Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue. New York: Aperture, 1994. 4to. Original deep grey publisher's cloth. Unclipped pictorial dust jacket. 160 pp. Black-and-white photographs throughout. First edition. Eugene Richards spent four years in the late 1980s and early 1990s working in three American communities at the epicentre of the crack cocaine epidemic: the Red Hook and East New York housing projects in Brooklyn, and North Philadelphia. He went in without concealment. He told the drug dealers and addicts he encountered that he was a photographer, that he was not going to photograph them covertly or obscure their faces, and that he wanted to understand and document the truth of how they lived. It took weeks to gain access. What he made in the time that followed is among the most sustained and morally serious bodies of documentary photography produced in America in the twentieth century. The text sections, written by Richards and journalist Edward Barnes, interweave first-person accounts from residents of the three communities with Richards's own observations. The afterword by Dr. Stephen W. Nicholas, a paediatric AIDS physician working in Harlem, provides clinical and epidemiological context. Richards designed the book himself. It accompanied a travelling exhibition that opened at the International Center of Photography in New York in January 1994. Near fine in very good dust jacket. Some minor wea

• Binding: Hardcover

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