ISOU, Isidore. La Photographie Lettriste, Hypergraphique, Infinitésimal et Supertemporelle. Paris: Editions PSI. 1971.
Portfolio of photographs loosely bound and housed in a presentation box; unpaginated; spotting to preliminaries and endpapers but internally clean; near fine.
A collective lettrist portfolio.
This portfolio was the Lettrist’s response to the legendry Artists & Photographs which Warhol, Lewitt, and Rauschenberg published the year before. The theoretical introduction, written by Isou, explains his innovations in photography since 1952. Isou invented infinitesimal” artworks in 1956, long before conceptual art, and an example of this type of work can be found in his exceptionally rare “infinitesimal” photograph titled Le Jardin towards the beginning of the portfolio. This piece invites the viewer to imagine a photograph of a whole garden through a single rose petal placed inside a pouch.
This portfolio is one of only two photographic collective portfolios which was created by the entirety of the Lettrist movement. The second was published twenty years later, in 1990, and that publication was produced without Lemaître. This copy is number four in a limited print run of thirty-five as stated in pencil to the limitation page. All the photographs and text are signed by the artists. Loosely inserted is a poster for the “Galerie Fischbacher” by Sabatier and the portfolio is comprised of twenty original photographs by the Lettrists: Arkitu, Battini, Broutin, Canal, Courteau, Lemaître, Sabatier, Sarthou, Tayarda, Venturini, Berreur, Curtay, Gillard, Hachette, Poyet, Satié, Scarnati, Roehmer, Tarkieltaub and Isou.
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