“THERE WAS A PART OF ME THAT DREW BACK SHARPLY FROM ITS EMOTIONAL IMPACT”

WEBB, Alex. Hot Light / Half-Made Worlds: Photographs from the Tropics. (New York): Thames and Hudson, (1986). Oblong quarto, original black cloth, original photographic dust jacket. $1250.

First edition of this provocative photo-essay on the tropical regions of the world, with 76 full-page color-printed photographs, signed by Webb on the half title.

"Here, in Alex Webb's gripping photographs, are the world's tropics in all their vivid beauty, desperation, exuberance, and incipient violence… With his brilliant combination of the new aesthetics of color photography and the great modern tradition of photojournalism, Alex Webb has forged not just a new style but a passionate and sometimes terrifying vision of the world." "I turned over the pages [of Hot Light], looking at images with bright, saturated color, large areas of empty black in many of them. There was a part of me that drew back sharply from its emotional impact. This was not the kind of polite and urbane color that most of us were then espousing, nor was it the photojournalist making black and white pictures in color. A parrot had got into the flock of pigeons on the square and this was no longer photography as we knew it" (Peter Marshall). McDarrah, 522.

Fine condition.