First Edition
Why pretend. Of course I wanted to have a conversation with Jeff Dunas about his photo book collection to get a closer look at some rare and wonderful monographs. Jeff has been collecting first edition photo books for decades and along the way managed to found the popular Palm Springs Photo Festival and established himself as a respected photographer.
What is your favorite photo book in your collection?
It’s a 1942 André Kertész book called Day Of Paris. It’s rare in and of itself, but what makes it really unique is that my copy is not only signed but dedicated to Alexander Liberman in the year of publication.
I was in a bookstore in Santa Monica and the owner had it listed as “signed” but couldn’t read the French inscription and didn’t understand who Liberman was or the value of a “presentation copy.” In the 1920s Alexander Liberman was the Russian-born art director of the magazine VU (which was in many ways, the precursor to later picture magazines such as Life, Paris Match and Stern). Kertész had done much of his best work for that magazine in the period before he immigrated to New York to escape the Nazi Occupation of his beloved Paris.
When the war came, Liberman ended up at Conde Nast in New York. When his old comrade Kertész was unable to get a second career in fashion photography off the ground in his new home, and being unsuited to any magazine with Conde Nast at the time, Liberman was able to give him work at House and Garden, where he stayed for many years (even though he felt they were his “lost years”).
Do you really look through all your books?
Yes.
You must occasionally buy books and say, “You know what this is not what I thought it would be,” and it turns out to be disappointing.
No, I know the books before I buy them. I never buy books I’ve never heard of or seen. I’m always looking for books I know about. Because I lived in France for many years, my collection is quite international and ranges primarily from 1906 to 1980. Of course I have recent books as well but have attempted to strengthen that period most. I’m only interested in books published during the photographer’s lifetime.
What changed in 1980?
By 1980, most books were being printed in offset. Formats became very much standardized and layout and design started to resemble each other. Quality was determined by what publishers felt the book should sell for, so fine printing became less prevalent. Quirky books became risky.
What are the design tropes that annoy you that you see over and over again? For example, I don’t like when pictures go across the gutter, I don’t mind it in a magazine, but not in a book.
That is also one of my pet peeves.
Basically, in book design I never did like when books started to look like magazine layouts. It editorializes the work and makes it look like everything else we see. It’s OK for now, but not for tomorrow. It doesn’t age well.
I don’t like when the art director gets overly creative with type. I’ve seen photo books where famous art directors have asserted themselves by using massive amounts of big type, and colored type and it overwhelms the work. If the work needs lots of bright colors and loud, creative typography, the work may not be that great and is probably not that important.
Some say that we’re in the golden age of the photo book right now, with so many young photographers doing great books with a variety of subjects.
For most collectors of photographic literature, the golden age of the photo book was between the 20s and 60s. That’s when the great, career making books came out.
Having a bunch of books published by people who haven’t yet reached the point where their vision is mature, or haven’t figured out really what they want to say or how they want to say it, may be driven more by self-promotion imperatives than having powerful work to add to the pantheon of photography.
Nice to look at but not important to collect unless perhaps the collection is built upon those kinds of titles.
A lot of publishers these days will do your book if you bring fifteen or twenty thousand bucks to the table. They only then have to sell 200 and they’ve broken even. It builds their catalogue, it looks like they’re a bigger house than they are - it’s all good for them.
How many books are in your collection?
I don’t really like to quantify my collection. The thing that is important to me personally is the condition of the books - not the quantity on my shelves (a good thing because I keep running out of shelves!) What defines rarity is condition, print run and quantities existent. They should be in as close to as-published condition as possible. Dog-eared reference copies of rare books are not collectible or particularly valuable unless they are important, very old and are amongst a very few in existence.
There is a difference between a collector and someone who simply acquires books (there’s nothing wrong with this!). A famous book collector once explained that often, people say they have a “collection” of books but in fact they don’t. They have an accumulation of books. A true collection is curated, based on having knowledge of the books, built by tracking down the finest examples, having a criteria for the collection. Caring properly for them is vital. Collections are not random in nature - you have to know what you’re looking for and hunt them down. Fill the holes. Switch them out when better copies are found.
I talked to a publisher about doing a book of my photographs one time and they implied that, as they don’t see a market for this book, therefore it’s a vanity project. For you, as someone who collects photo books, where is the line between vanity project and art book?
Vanity? So what? Many fantastic photo books were self-published. This includes Lee Friedlander, Ralph Gibson, Helmut Newton and many others. Publishers didn’t come to me asking to publish my work. I put together the books and sold them to publishers. What’s the difference? The important thing is what you leave behind, what’s out there in the public record, and who you were as a photographer.
A big thank you to Lou Noble, Michelle Golden and Sonny Thakur for their help with this piece.