Twenty Parachutes
2002
$41.00
Twenty Parachutes by Margaret Bourke-White. First edition (2002). First impression. Medium format hardback in fine condition. No markings. Please see pictures. PayPal accepted, any questions please get in touch.
About Twenty Parachutes
“Few photography careers have been as narrated and celebrated as Margaret Bourke-White’s career. With legendary fortitude and energy, time and again, she nailed the assignments she was given. Also with formal brilliance and incisive descriptive power. In this series of images, we feel her precision relaxing, as she recorded a struggle between natural force and human ingenuity. Between our limitations and the grand devices we create to defy them. So, in the March 22, 1937 issue of LIFE, there was a cover story entitled “Parachutes.”
Bourke-White’s pictures told the story of the Irving Air Chute Company in Buffalo, New York. This was then the world’s largest manufacturer of parachutes. Although, the photographic sequence of parachutes being tested by Irving employees in this book did not make the article in 1937. But survive instead as diminutive and precious vintage prints, as art. Their wonder is in their ambiguity, their lack of captions and also context. Also their archetypal address of the questions of human importance. As well as of who is really pulling the strings. Printed in duotone on matte stock, and bound in Japanese saifu. So, this elegant little book is an important addition to the literature on this extraordinary artist.” – Nazraeli Press
