A California Landscape. Photographs & text by Jeff Lovlace. Garland Publishing Company, Arroyo Grande, CA, 1965. 64 pp. Oblong octavo (5 x 11 in.). First Edition (later reprinted in a trade edition by Studio Press, Berkeley, in 1968 in a somewhat different format; it is is much more common than the one presently on offer). Stiff photo-illustrated wrappers. 37 black-and-white reproductions.
Hailing from Santa Maria, California, home of Vandenburg Air Force Base, Lovelace juxtaposes images of the landscape, the town and the perimeters of the base with his own prose text interspersed. While one of my colleagues says that the book "[deserves] a place in the pantheon of sixties artist's books," I tend to think of it as a totally fascinating example of a particular style & genre--Modernist landscape according to Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and a few others--in its very late stages (taken up with youthful exuberance by a clearly talented teenager). It would have been avant-garde in, say, 1935. In 1965, on the other hand, the cutting-edge was Ruscha's Every Building on Sunset Strip (for example). A fantastic book!
Near Fine-; edge wear; short corner crease to front cover; shallow vertical crease to rear cover. |
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