Product Details
Hardcover
76 pages
Blind River Editions
Published 2000
Book Description
Essay by Edward Rosser. Foreword by Rudolf Arnheim.
This book introduces one of the great photographers of our century, Emil Mayer, a turn-of-the-century Viennese street photographer whose prints were largely destroyed by the Gestapo after his death. Viennese Types is Mayer's surviving masterwork, a recently discovered portfolio of original prints that is published here for the first time. It is by any measure one of the most extraordinary collections in the literature of photography, lyrical, meditative, and deeply moving. And the prints themselves, bromoil transfers, are wonderful, giving each image the suggestive, timeless quality of an etching or lithograph. Rudolf Arnheim, in the foreword to the book, calls Mayer 'an intimate master.' Others have compared his work to that of Henri Cartier-Bresson. But as Mayer's photographs were taken in the early years of the century, long before those of Cartier-Bresson and other street photographers, this collection is like nothing ever seen before: it is a window on a vanished age, seen through modern eyes. Designed by Carl Zahn, and printed in Italy by Stamperia Valdonega, this is a book of truly exquisite beauty.
"Photography, the quintessentially modern, curious art, has, with the passage of time and modernity's accelerating destruction of pastness, accumulated for our melancholy inspection the most irrefutable and poignant cargo of memory. Thanks to Edward Rosser for this window on a lost world, and the recovery, in Emil Mayer, of a masterful photographer who had been lost to us." --Susan Sontag
"Viennese Types is a wonderful book of superb photographs by a photographer whose work had been lost to us, and has now been found again. The pictures describe a world that was common at the beginning of the twentieth century, and that now seems as remote as the world of Bruegel." -John Szarkowski
"An intimate master of the photographic medium." -Rudolf Arnheim, from the foreword
About the author
Dr. Emil Mayer was a lawyer and photographer who was active in Vienna at the turn of the century. Long forgotten as a result of the Holocaust--most of his original prints were destroyed by the Gestapo after his death, by suicide, in 1938--one portfolio of his original prints has recently been discovered. This portfolio, a collection of street scenes of Vienna dating from 1910, reveals Mayer as one of the great street photographers of the 20th century. |
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