David Seidner - Nudes - 1995

After the tremendous success of the first auction, 5Uhr30.com (Ecki Heuser, Cologne) now proudly presents the second edition of “Masters of Erotic Photobooks" on Catawiki.
Enjoy another highly personal selection of books dedicated to eroticism in all its beautiful facets - drawn from my private library and from various acquisitions over the past years.
A toast to love, passion, and desire!

SMALL, IMPRESSIVE NUDE PHOTOBOOK by excellent American photographer David Seidner (1957-1999), who died to young.

EXCELLENT, VERY FRESH CONDITION (like new and unread).

The highly respected International Center of Photography (ICP) writes:
"David Seidner was born in 1957 in Los Angeles. At seventeen he moved to Paris to work as a fashion photographer and by nineteen, his pictures were appearing on magazine covers. Seidner had his first solo exhibition in 1978. Based in Paris for most of his career, Seidner had a two-year exclusive contract with Yves Saint Laurent. His images, which appeared in Harper's Bazaar, Harper's & Queen, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and international editions of Vogue in the 1980s and 90s, greatly influenced fashion photography for over a decade.
For photographs of couture designed by Azzedine Alaia, Chanel, Mme. Grès, Jean Patou, Ungaro, Valentino, and Yves Saint Laurent, Seidner often used the techniques of fragmentation, dynamic lighting, and cropping he had begun to explore in his earliest works. One early series of fragmented faces was inspired by the music of John Cage, the avant-garde artist. In these works, the face or body of the model is visually cut up and collaged together through multiple exposures, reflections in pieces of mirror, or by chemical manipulations in the printing.
In addition to his advertising and editorial fashion work, Seidner also pursued other projects dealing with clothing, the body, and art. He photographed the miniature war-time couture replicas housed at the Musée des arts de la mode in Paris as well as the Academy Award-winning costumes Eiko Ishioka designed for film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula. In the 1990s, Seidner spent eight years photographing the studios of well-known contemporary artists including Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Brice Marden, Richard Serra, and Cindy Sherman. To further distinguish this work from his fashion photography, he photographed the sitter in a stark black background and presented the images as fine hand-made prints using the antique platinum printing process. In addition to documenting paintings and sculptures in progress, Seidner also made a black and white headshot of each subject, dramatically side-lit and cropped at the chin.
In the "Nudes" series, Seidner again used this striking lighting technique. He photographed male and female models from the front and back standing in classical contrapposto. Because they stand in front of a black background and the lighting from the side accentuates the muscles and curves of their bodies, they resemble Greek marble sculptures of athletes, gods, and goddesses. This interest in art history and portraiture culminated in years of research on the models for the painter John Singer Sargent. Seidner sought out the descendents of these sitters who were chiefly women and men of the upper class in England and America. Their offspring, members of the wealthy classes of over a century later, posed in the similarly sumptuous fashions of their ancestors, often propped on a period sofa or chair. These large-scale works seamlessly combine contemporary color photography with the conventions of late-nineteenth-century portrait paintings by Sargent and Ingres. In his final series of highly saturated color images of orchids from 1999, Seidner seemed to be moving away from portraiture and instead reinvestigating the abstract compositions of his early fashion photographs."

And the highly respected "Photoeye Bookstore" in Santa Fe says:
"David Seidner explores the variations of the human form in this intriguing work. The book is a series of nudes, first seen from the front, then from the back, all in the same pose against a black background. But the homogeneity of the setting draws attention to the profound differences between the bodies. There remains something in all of them which allows a glimpse into what the photographer calls "the universal and the ideal". Gorgeous reproductions make this unique work quite stunning."

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Gina Kehayoff, Munich. 1995. First edition, first printing.

Paperback (as issued). 165 x 225 mm. 56 pages. (7 pages with text, 49 pages with photos). 51 black and white photos (including 2 on the cover). Photos: David Seidner. Design: Peter Langemann. Text: David Seidner. Text in English.

Condition:
Inside excellent, very fresh and flawless. Outside very fresh, marginal trace of use. Overall near mint, near perfect condition.

Great nude photobook by David Seidner - in wonderful fresh condition.