Ballet.

Reissue of the 1945 edition. Photographs by Alexey Brodovitch. Text by Edwin Denby. Edited by Nina Holland and Joshua Chuang. Design by Alexey Brodovitch (1945), adapted by Nina Holland (2024).

Little Steidl, Göttingen, Germany, 2024. 104 Photographs, 11x8¼".

Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet is a legend – one of the most influential and coveted works in the history of the photobook, but so rare that many connoisseurs have never seen a copy of the original edition, much less held it in their own hands. It has been conjured in the imagination and hinted at through documentation, but it remains more of a mystery than a reality for many.

Brodovitch’s aim was to capture dance in the spontaneous, living present. Free of all artistic preconceptions and working with a sense of existential imperative, he immersed himself over a span of five years in the final performances of the Ballets Russes on tour in America. These included productions of Bronislava Nijinska’s “Les Cents Baisers” and “Les Noces;” George Balanchine’s “La Concurrence” and “Cotillon;” and Leonide Massine’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” “Le Tricorne,” “La Boutique Fantasque,” “Septième Symphonie,” and “Choreartium;” as well as “Le Lac des Cygnes” (after Petipa) and “Les Sylphides” (after Fokine). By the time the book was published in 1945, the arc of the revolutionary dance tradition ignited by Sergei Diaghilev and carried on by his artistic heirs had reached its end.

In Ballet, Brodovitch engaged the image and the book form in ways that continue to fascinate. Printing, however, played an equally decisive role in his experiment. He intensified the grain of his photographic film with an experimental gravure printing method that was risky and unpredictable. The improvised process required the printer to be totally engaged in the moment of creation – analogous to a dancer in performance. His every decision and challenge would be captured on the pages. The inking and scraping mechanisms of the rotogravure press were used to mark the action of dance aggressively across the broad spreads of the book, producing images that often resemble drawings more than photographs. Stray smudges, streaks, and blotches of ink were accepted, and even embraced. Plates wore down, and ink levels fluctuated to the extreme. The exact marks left on the pages – which might be considered flaws in a different production context – were not as important as the fact that they were present and visible as honest and spontaneous marks of the moment of creation.

On the eve of the 80th anniversary of the publication of Ballet, Little Steidl’s reissue brings Brodovitch’s masterpiece back to life in all its material intensity with an experimental five-tone printing method developed specially for the project. The bespoke technique, which pushes the technical limits of offset-lithography to extremes, was developed and carried out by Nina Holland with the intention of reanimating not only the visual intensity of the 1945 edition, but also the risk and spontaneity of Brodovitch’s experiment. In a separate booklet accompanying the reissue, Holland and co-editor Joshua Chuang deliver a previously unknown story about the 1945 production – drawn from their forensic study of the original edition – that suggests Brodovitch’s artistic achievement should be viewed not just as one of the highlights, but as a singularly radical work in the history of the photographic book and printing.

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Cat# ZK690H Hardbound $250.00 (9783944630076)
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