Philippe Halsman

Sight and Insight

SIGNED Philippe Halsman

Sight and Insight. Words and Photographs by Philippe Halsman. Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York, 1972. Designed by Herb Lubalin. First edition. Large quarto. Hardcover. Printed cloth in dustjacket. 188 pp. SIGNED by Philippe Halsman on the first free endpaper. Inscribed and dated 1977.

Philippe Halsman, born in Latvia, was a portrait and fashion photographer in Paris before moving to America in 1940, where he embarked on a career as one of the most high profile photographic portraitists of the twentieth century. He photographed politicians, movie stars, artists, writers, musicians, sports figures, and scientists; his images were on the cover of LIFE and other magazines for decades. He also took surreal experimental images of many of his sitters, most famously Salvador Dali. This book is a collection of one hundred portraits, with accompanying text giving insight into what the photographer was thinking during the photo sessions. Among the notable sitters included are Albert Einstein, Alfred Hitchcock, John F. Kennedy, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Edward Steichen, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali, Anna Magnani, Andre Gide, Andre Malraux, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, Robert Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Gloria Swanson, Mae West, Learned Hand, The Windsors, Adlai Stevenson, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Aldous Huxley, Ava Gardner, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Patty Duke, Marc Chagall, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Bertrand Russell, Artur Rubinstein, Wendell Willkie, Jonas Salk, William F. Buckley, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Tallullah Bankhead, David Merrick, Humphrey Bogart, Grace Kelly, Joan Baez, Elizabeth Taylor, John Steinbeck, Bobby Fischer, Jean Cocteau, and others.

Very good in a good plus dust jacket. Front board has a slight bend upwards. Clean and bright. Slight fading to the bottom edge. Minor soil spots. Internally, hinges sound. Binding tight. All pages intact. Hint of tanning to page edges. Unmarked. Beautiful clean photographs printed in gorgeous gravure. DJ lightly soiled and rubbed w/ moderate wear. Numerous scratches and scuff marks visible in the light. Few creases. Right angle crease to the rear DJ flap. Not price clipped. Dali & Halsman exhibition catalog laid in.  

A very nice copy of this comprehensive monograph of photographer Philippe Halsman’s most important and well known portrait and experimental photography beautifully reproduced in gravure. Probably the best book on Philippe Halsman.

SIGNED by Philippe Halsman.