Unguided Tour by Sylvia Plachy

(1990)

First Edition

Large format hardback in fine condition. Some shelf wear to the corners of the dust jacket and cover board. Previous owner subscription on the inside of the cover board. Very slight toning to the extremities of the pages. Otherwise, pages clean and binding firm.

About

Plachy’s photographs are at once journalistic and personal. While presented here as an “unguided tour” of everything from portraits (parents, pets, musicians, and writers) to street photographs (markets, factories, accident sites, and demonstrations), the pictures have in common beautifully arrested motion and expressive emotion. Richly printed in duotone, 130 black-and-white photographs–accompanied by the artist’s statements and vignettes of dreams–weave in time and place from Plachy’s birthplace in Hungary to France, Sicily, Howard Beach, and Nicaragua. The collection is also notable for its humorous and striking juxtapositions. Tom Waits’s musical accompaniment (on a flexible record included with the book) is superfluous but perhaps emblematic: traditionally Hungarian in flavour, transformed into a unique creation. Unguided Tour was a travelling exhibition which opened September 1990 at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.