FIRST EDITION OF LUCAS SAMARAS’ FIRST BOOK OF PHOTOGRAPHY

(SAMARAS, Lucas). Samaras Album. Autointerview Autobiography Autopolaroid. New York: The Whitney Museum of American Art and Pace Editions, (1971). Large quarto, original pictorial cloth, mounted cover photograph. $1200.

First edition of Samaras’ multimedia self-portrait, featuring a self-interview, autobiography, and hundreds of Polaroid images, both black-and-white and in color.

Published in anticipation of the Whitney’s 1972 Samaras retrospective, “Album gathers the artist’s first body of photographic work, the revealingly transformative self-portraits he called ‘Autopolaroids… The book’s design is nearly as idiosyncratic as its contents. Images-usually antic, erotic variations on a theme-are reproduced in their original size in color and in black and white, and arranged in grids, in rows, or singly on a page as if in a family snapshot album or a demented high school yearbook” (Roth, 212-13).

About-fine condition.