Christopher Wool: East Broadway Breakdown, Special Limited Edition (with Unique Type-C Print #098)
Publisher: Berlin: Holzwarth Publications, 2003
Edition: 1st Edition
Binding: Soft cover
ISBN: 3935567111
Condition: New / New
Item #: 107708
$1,750.00
Specifics
First edition, first printing. Limited edition of 160 copies with an original 10.2 x 15 cm black and white Type-C print (Kodalux Processing) by Christopher Wool, enclosed in a Mylar sleeve and archival white envelope, and a copy of the book stamped in black ink ("Christopher Wool -- East Broadway Breakdown. Special Edition") on the title page (the book is not signed), housed in a TrueCore (Light Impressions) archival box with the same stamp in black ink on the top cover.
The print, which corresponds to one of the 160 reproductions in the book, is signed, dated ("2003"), numbered (1/160 to 160/160, this being print #98), and stamped on verso ("Christopher Wool -- East Broadway Breakdown. Special Edition"). Soft cover. White stiff wrappers with photographically illustrated dust jacket. Photographs by Christopher Wool. Designed by Hans Werner Holzwarth and Christopher Wool. 328 pp., with black-and-white plates throughout. 11 x 8-1/2 inches.
[Cited in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Volume III. (London and New York: Phaidon, 2014)].
Condition
New in publisher's packaging.
Description
From the publisher: "Between 1994 and 1995, Christopher Wool shot a series of photographs in downtown New York City that he calls East Broadway Breakdown, after a street on the Lower East Side, the neighborhood where he lives and works. Taken at night using a 35mm camera, the pictures feature the neighborhood's signature streets, with their dilapidated storefronts and ramshackle staircases leading up to anonymous spaces. The high contrast images are often hard to read, producing, rather than coherent images, seemingly random forms that emerge from skewed camera angles. Like his paintings, Wool's photographs hover between abstraction and representation, forcing viewers to confront their desire for visual coherence while offering an alternative construct for picture-making today."
An excerpt from "Ghost Dog" by Anne Pontégnie ("Christopher Wool, Crosstown Crosstown"): "A succession of images in undifferentiated shades of gray that immerse the viewer in this nocturnal world. Their realism has more to do with this subjectivity dis-solved in its context than with any hypothetical truth of representation. In his paintings and photographs, Wool might associate with stray dogs, neurosis, or debris: stains, drips, and accidents of various origins, pictorial or organic. This voluntary assimilation with degrading phenomena -- another form of humor, this time, black -- is the instrument that allows him to achieve the dissolution found in these photographs and gives him access to a singular vision: one that is street level."
