The Sweet Flypaper of Life. Photographs by Roy DeCarava. Text by Langston Hughes. Howard University Press, Washington, D.C., 1984. 112 pp. Quarto. Third printing (1991). Signed on title page. Clothbound in photo-illustrated dust jacket. Black-and-white reproductions.
In The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1 Martin Parr and Gerry Badger explain that as the reformist drive of much documentary work began to diminish, supplanted by a more "personal kind of expression," many photographers "rejected the close marriage of image and text that characterized the 1930s documentary photobook. Photography became more overtly elliptical, playing deliberately on the mediums's ambiguities...Sweet Flypaper was published not as an out-and-out social documentary book, but with DeCarava's 'real life' images illustrating a fictional text by Hughes about life in Harlem...The most significant feature of The Sweet Flypaper of Life (apart from its great title) is not its indeterminate status as fact, fiction, or even 'faction', but that a leading mainstream publisher took the chance of publishing a view of a minority community from the 'inside'."
A bit of sun-striking to jacket; previous owner's name on half-title page; otherwise Fine/Fine. |
back