SIGNED LIMITED FIRST EDITION OF GENTHE’S AS I REMEMBER

GENTHE, Arnold. As I Remember. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, (1936). Quarto, original half blue morocco gilt, beveled boards, top edge gilt, uncut and partially unopened, original slipcase. $850.

Signed limited first edition of Genthe’s autobiography, number 156 of only 250 copies signed by him, with 112 handsome photogravures (two in color).

Arnold Genthe’s As I Remember looks back on a career in which the German-born photographer became “best known for two very different bodies of work: his documentation of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake… and his book Pictures of Old Chinatown (1908)” (Parr & Badger I:75). In addition to images from these and other works, As I Remember features Genthe’s portraits of notables such as Isadora Duncan, John D. Rockefeller and Teddy Roosevelt, many seen here for the first time in book form. Especially evocative is Genthe’s 1925 portrait of a young Greta Garbo, poised to make film history with Flesh and the Devil (1926), an image classically defined by Genthe’s use of Pictorialism’s “soft-focus, atmospheric effects” (Frizot, 498). See Szarkowski, 54.

Images clean and bright; minor rubbing to extremities of original slipcase. A fine copy.