Erich Mendelsohn, Fritz Lang - Amerika - 1928

VERY SCARCE, EXCELLENT PHOTOBOOK by Erich Mendelsohn (which was published only in Germany) -
a treat for anyone who loves modern architecture, brilliant layout and typography, and outstanding photography.
With one photo by legendary German film director Fritz Lang ('Metropolis').

Martin Parr, The Photobook, vol 1, page 76/77.

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Complete German title is:
'Amerika. Bilderbuch eines Architekten' ('America - Picture book of an architect').

Erich Mendelsohn's architectural photographs from his time in America can be considered avant-garde. Although he is known in Germany as an important representative of Expressionism, he further developed his formal language in the US and integrated new elements of functionalism and modernism.
The combination of these different stylistic elements and the development of a dynamic functionalism make his American works an interesting example of avant-garde architecture that transcends the traditional boundaries of expressionism.
Therefore, it can be said that Mendelsohn's architectural photography from his American period can be considered avant-garde, as it combines innovative elements from various movements and represents a new approach to architecture.

The term avant-garde is used when an artist takes an innovative and experimental approach to one aspect of their art. The avant-garde in photography takes a critical stance towards existing aesthetic views.
It is important to understand that avant-garde refers to an artistic movement that challenges existing aesthetic norms and seeks new forms of expression.

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Rudolf Mosse Buchverlag, Berlin, 1928. First edition, second enlarged printing.

There were at this time only two printings of that title:
First in 1926, mentioned in the book as 'first till third printing' and second in 1928, an enlarged edition, mentioned in the book as 'different, enlarged sixth printing'. I have never seen a fourth and fifth printing. This second one, i am offering here, is mentioned in Martin Parr.

Hardback with white paper and dark blue spine with hell blue letters without dustjacket (as issued). 243 x 345 mm. 228 pages. 82 pages. 100 photos. Photos: Erich Mendelsohn, Lönberg-Holm (Detroit), Fritz Lang, Erich A. Karweik. Text by Erich Mendelsohn. Text in German.

Condition:
Inside excellent, fresh and flawless, clean with no foxing and with no marks, excepted a longer private (?) dedication from 1930 (!) in German by (unknown) very beautiful hand at the right edge of the first blank page; no other marks. Outside like so often with trace of use (see pictures), but this copy better and fresher than usual and with no remarkable defects (like bumped corners etc). Overall fine condition.

Wonderful book, for typography and layout collectors, for architecture book collectors and for photobook collectors - very scarce, hard to find in any condition.

'In 1924 the German architect Erich Mendelsohn made an extensive trip across the United States, taking photographs of modern architecture, which he published in a popular photobook, Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (America: An Architect's Picturebook, 1925). He was a talented amateur photographer, and his images are powerfully expressive, romantic in the mode of Alfred Stieglitz, and like Stieglitz's work, a combination of the pictorial and the modernist.
Mendelsohn's opinion of the United States and American architecture expressed in the book is mixed too.
'This country gives everything: the worst of Europe, abortions of civilization, but also hopes for a new world.'
His views on American architecture were equally rigorous: 'Today the castles of commerce are still borrowed symbols of power, while their rear elevations, with their logical structure, are frequently even now surprising tokens of a true future.'
It was this emphasis on the 'true' and the 'logical' that characterized Mendelsohn as a modernist. He turned his camera not just on the facades of buildings, but also on their rears, with their accretions of fire-escape stairs.
His enquiring eye examined not just buildings, but also streetscapes, cars and passing pedestrians, as well as purely functional structures like giant billboards and the reinforced-concrete grain elevators of Buffalo that were such an inspiration to him and to other European modern architects like Le Corbusier. To postwar Europe these were not just signs of modernity but symbols of plenty.
And yet, although Mendelsohn was a thoroughly modern architect, he was essentially a pictorialist pho-tographer, albeit one who was rapidly discovering a more modernist photographic language. He was probably unconcerned with matters of photographic style, and was led to this new language through his subject matter, of which he had a highly sophisticated under-standing. He often ignored the standard etiquette of professional architectural photography, tilting his camera vertiginously. Cropping his pictures into thin verticals, he emphasized the height of the American city, demonstrating a possible familiarity with the pictorial language of Alvin Langdon Coburn or early Stieglitz. In all, this is a fascinating transitional photobook, the work of a talented amateur photographer with prior knowledge of pictorialist modes groping towards a proto-modernism as he worked.'
- Gerry Badger -