Water's Edge
Lyme, CT: Callaway Editions, [1980].
Deluxe edition, consisting of four copies of the book each signed and numbered by Harry Callahan with a correspondingly numbered original gelatin silver print, each one different and signed on mount recto. Bound in publisher's linen housed in parchment-backed linen-covered clamshell boxes, spines lettered in blind and numbered 1-4, which are in turn housed in a matching linen slipcase. Volumes, clamshell boxes, and prints all Fine, in a Near Fine slipcase with a light wear and a hint of soiling. A lovely set. In Vol. II of their seminal The Photobook: A History Parr and Badger write, "Callahan was particularly adept at making photographs of nothingness, and his best book, Water's Edge [...], gives full rein to this facility. He had been making minimalist images of Lake Michigan from his Chicago days, but the meat of this book derives from the time when he moved to New England to teach at the Rhode Island School of Design and made a series of photographs on the region's beaches—chiefly on Cape Cod—during the 1970s. Shot with a wide-angle lens, these pictures are wonderfully evocative of those bracing early morning walks or swims in which one revels in the solitariness of the experience...Without shouting about it, as some American modernists have, Callahan imbues Water's Edge with a meditative, Zen-like quality, which reminds us that studying with him in Chicago was Yasuhiro Ishimoto...who took some of his teacher's influence back to Japan. It is not such a large step, for instance, from Harry Callahan to Hiroshi Sugimoto..."
. Item #140949458
Price: $8,500