Metal.
Krull, Germaine. Métal. Paris: Librairie des Arts Decoratifs, [1927].
Large 4to.; loose leaves; illustrated throughout with black-and-white colotypes; printed pictorial portfolio boards; lightly tanned, with very minor edge wear; black cloth spine; small split at head; black cloth ties, intact. In a specially made slipcase.
First edition.
In the 1920s, Man Ray told Krull, “Germaine, you and I are the greatest photographers of our time, I in the old sense and you in the modern one.” Krull was French, but born of German nationality in Poland in 1897. She studied photography in Munich in 1916-18, and from 1922-24 photographed the cranes, drawbridges, ships, and industrial machinery of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Paris, turning their soaring angles into grand monuments to modernity. Robert Delaunay liked this work so much, he managed to get it into the 1926 Salon d’Automne—the first and only time photographs were allowed into the august exhibition.
Métal is an early celebration of the industrial age, the age of machines and steel. Though photographers would return to the subject regularly, few ever achieved the buoyancy and exultant freedom of Krull’s images. In 1982, at age 85 (after living for nearly twenty years in the north of India with Tibetan Buddhist refugee followers of the Dalai Lama), Krull reflected, “All my life, I have tried to show reality and have always tried to create something new.” In this, Krull was an early exemplar of photographic modernism.
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