Erich Mendelsohn was a German architect and member of the progressive group Der Ring, which included Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and others. In 1924, he travelled to the United States, visiting several cities where he took these photographs of the dynamic architecture of New York and Chicago, factories in Detroit, and reinforced grain elevators in Buffalo. Mendelsohn's photographs reject many architectural photography conventions, showing the fire escapes on the rear of the buildings as well as the facades, tilting his camera, and often cropping his pictures vertically to emphasise the height of these American cities. In 1928 a second edition was published.
Mendelsohn left Germany in 1933 following the rise of National Socialism, moving first to Brussels and then establishing his architectural practice in London, opening a second office in Jerusalem in 1935, where he completed several important commissions, including the Weizmann Institute of Science, Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, and Rambam Hospital in Haifa. In 1941, Mendelsohn emigrated to the United States, where he continued to work, settling in San Francisco in 1945.

First edition; 343 x 233 mm, 13½ x 9¼ in); black-and-white photographs printed in gravure; plain endpapers, yellow paper-covered boards, black cloth spine and tips, titles to spine in yellow and to upper side in black, sides ruled in black, lightly toned and rubbed, an excellent copy; [ii], x, [174]pp.

Fotografia Publica p171; [Second edition] The Photobook: A History I, pp76-7.