First edition, first printing. Presentation copy from the photographer, inscribed (on the verso of the front wrapper) to his longtime friend and fellow photographer: "For Beaumont Newhall, with affectionate good wishes, Ansel Adams, Dec. 24th 1944". A significant association copy: Beaumont Newhall (1908-1993) was a curator, photographer and writer whose The History of Photography remains one of the most important and widely distributed books on that subject. In addition, "Adams assisted Beaumont Newhall and David McAlpin in forming the Department of Photography (the first in the country) at the Museum of Modern Art in 1940" (International Center of Photography online). "In 1943 Ansel Adams took up Dorothea Lange's challenge to advocate for Japanese Americans through a documentary project that has been largely overlooked by art critics and aficionados of his work... Since he received his first camera as a boy and began making exposures in Yosemite Valley during family vacations, Adams closely associated picture making with his love for the natural world. Adams believed that places such as Yosemite were sources of spiritual renewal and healing. Representing such sites through photographs codified his belief in the transformative power of both art and nature. Nowhere are the possibilities and limits of Adams's vision more apparent than in his work on Manzanar title Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans. Banished from Adams's oeuvre by his publishing machine and largely ignored by critics, Born Free and Equal reveals an important moment both in the history of Adams's visual politics and in the role of the camera in defining the boundaries of loyalty and citizenship in the twentieth century. In his work at Manzanar, Adams challenged the derogatory portrayal of people of Japanese descent in U.S. was propaganda by insisting on the loyalty and 'Americanness' of the incarcerated. Respectful portraits and sympathetic scenes of everyday life in the camp, interspersed with stunning images of natural beauty, represented Japanese Americans as dignified and respectable - a relatively radical move at a time when U.S. war propaganda and the popular media questioned the very humanity of people of Japanese descent" (Jasmine Alinder, Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration, 2009, Chapter 2). Decidedly uncommon commercially and according to Copac not represented in any British and Irish institutional library - although OCLC cites a copy at Leeds - otherwise well represented institutionally (albeit almost exclusively in the U.S.). Copies inscribed in or near the year of publication are particularly scarce.
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