New York.

Complete with rare dust jacket. In 1909 and 1910, Coburn produced two books, London and then New York. While the photographs in London reach back to the nineteenth century and beyond, New York is the more proto-modernist work, with this most modern of twentieth-century cities pushing Coburn towards a more radical way of seeing.

In Camera Work 36 (October 1911), Coburn wrote: 'It has been said of me... that I work too quickly, and that I attempt to photograph all New York in a week. Now to me New York is a vision that rises out of the sea as I come up the harbor on my Atlantic liner... I can do only the creative part of photography, the making of the negative, with the fire of enthusiasm burning at the white heat; but the final stage, the print, requires quiet contemplation, time, in fact, for its fullest expression. That is why my best work is from American negatives printed in England... it is only at twilight that the city reveals itself to me in the fullness of its beauty, when the arc lights on the Avenue click into being.

First edition, folio (407 x 308 mm, 16 x 12¼ in); 20 hand-pulled photogravures printed under Coburn's supervision from plates prepared by him; light foxing to text leaves, grey endpapers, olive morocco-backed grey boards with gilt lettering on upper side, repair to head and foot of spine, publisher's grey printed dust jacket with letterpress titles in dark blue on upper side, three short tears conserved, light offsetting to verso from spine, an excellent copy in the the rare dust-jacket, in a custom drop spine box; 12, [40]pp.

The Photobook: A History I, p74; Imagining Paradise pp226-227; The Open Book: A History of the Photographic Book from 1878 to the Present pp52-53.