Die Deutschen. Photographs by René Burri. Edited by Hans Bender. Texts by numerous writers including Berthold Brecht, Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Max Frisch, and Heinrich Boll. Fretz & Wasmuth/Robert Delpire, Zurich/Paris, 1962. Oblong First edition. Clothbound in photo-illustrated dust jacket. Gravure reproductions. Text in German.
Burri is the subject of much renewed interest of late from some rather haute bastions of fashion and cool: Rei Kawakubo of the Comme des Garcon clothing label, invited him to collaborate on their recent campaign; a portfolio of that work, along with an fantastic interview with editor Olivier Zahm appears in the current issue of Purple Here's a taste:
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I’ve been accused, say, by people when I’ve been on juries, of being against conceptual photography. I’m not against it! Let them do their concepts. What I always found to be absolutely magic is that hundredth of a second when you can freeze-frame something, a person, an event. Even now, when I look at some of my pictures, I don’t know how I did them. They just happened in a kind of conspiracy with life itself.-- René Burri
Burri's first book--a commercial failure in its time--has become a classic of post-war European documentary photography. Intended as a counterpart to Robert Frank's Les Americains and similar in design, René Burri's Die Deutschen is considered the definitive portrait of a complex, changing nation struggling shake off the legacy of World War II and redefine itself.
As Parr and Badger explain, this German edition was published a year before it appeared in French as Les Allemands under the same 'Encyclopédie essentielle' imprint as Frank's celebrated book. "If Frank had not raised the bar to impossible heights", they go on to say, "Burri's book would be more widely regarded as one of the best photobooks of the 1960s."
Slight tilt to spine, otherwise Fine, in Fine- jacket with bits of wear at 'tips'. |
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