Manfred Curry - A Travers Les Nuages - 1932

Similar to the amazing photobook Aircraft by Le Corbusier, this book is a celebration of flight in the 1930s and the advent of the modern age. With a selection of dramatic images of cloud formations interspersed with aircraft in flight edited by Curry, this optimistic photobook is a celebration of man's conquest of the air and the shrinking of the world thanks to the advent of air travel. Printed in gravure the book is filled with sepia and cyan-tinted images of airships and airliners of the period as well as military aircraft, this book captures the drama of early aviation and the excitement of the inter-war period when modernism and the machine age were regarded as a symbol of progress and a way of making the world a better place. Only a few years after this book was printed, aircraft would be viewed in a very different light as the bombing campaigns of World War 2 reduced many cities to ruins.

100 photographs reproduced in rotogravure. Preface by Louis Bréguet (who built a forerunner of the helicopter with his brother in 1905) and 12 pages of text on the different shapes of clouds. Photos of gliders, Köhl sports plane, Udet and his Klemm aircraft, thunderstorm in formation, cumulus clouds, sea of clouds, gliding flight, seaplane over the Atlantic, 4500 meters above the Alps, as well as groundbreaking composite photographs made by renowned aviation photographer Alfred Buckham.

The German edition of this amazing photobook is included in Manfred Heiting and Roland Jäger, Autopsie, vol 2, page 422

Condition:
Very good first edition copy of this fantastic book with the very rare dust jacket. General agewear and small tears to front and rear of dust jacket. Signature of previous owner on blank page. Small creases to corners of some of the text pages and blemishes to blank page separating the introductory text and the photographic plates. Please examine listing photos carefully.