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Schapiro, Steve (Photographer); Donoghue, Theophilus & Gravy, Wavy (Contributors) : Bliss: Transformational Festivals & The Neo Hippie

Powerhouse Books, Brooklyn, NY, 2015

ISBN 1576877639

First Edition / First Printing. Fine in No Dust Jacket, As Issued. 300 pages. Landmark collection of color photographs. One of the most important documentary photography books of our time. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. A brilliant production by Francesca Richer: Oversize-volume format. Pictorial cloth boards with titles embossed on the cover and spine, as issued. Photographs by Steve Schapiro. Text by Theophilus Donoghue, Schapiro's son and himself a Neo Hippie, and Wavy Gravy. Printed on pristine-white, thick coated stock paper in Tokyo, Japan to the highest standards. Without DJ, as issued. Presents Steve Schapiro's "Bliss: Transformational Festivals & The Neo Hippie". The most comprehensive, and the best, book on its much-misunderstood and still-relevant subject. "Hippie" is, of course, associated with The Sixties, the counterculture, and free love. But the Neo Hippie Movement is now decidedly more focussed on transcendence and spirituality, which it does not see as incompatible with sexual liberation, but rather as the higher, final evolution of it: "Unlike the hippies of the past, the current generation is more inclined towards meditation, yoga, prayer, and ecstatic dance as the means of entering altered states" (Theophilus Donoghue). The Neo Hippie is also apolitical in the purest sense: Rejection of politics as the solution to the problems of Mankind is one of its underlying premises. Still, as these photographs show, there remains a great deal of communal nudity. If the emphasis is on spirituality, why then is there so much nudity? Because it tests - and proves - the convert's sincerity. The naked body distracts. But if one seeks and has attained genuine spiritual connection, the naked body becomes literally immaterial, one's own and others'. Spirituality begins with eye-to-eye contact of such intensity and concentration that one forgets the body, and sees only the soul. To outsiders and skeptics, this will come across as too idealistic and abstract. Well, that is what the Neo Hippie ambitiously seeks: "Bliss" is nothing less than the Western equivalent-answer to Eastern/Buddhist "Nirvana" (almost all Neo Hippies are white). Steve Schapiro, legendary for his photographs of the 1960's, including the hippies of the era, is surely the ideal photographer of this great and fascinating Movement. An absolute "must-have" title for Steve Schapiro collectors. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed in black pen-marker on the half-title page by Steve Schapiro. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a contemporary photography classic. As far as we know, this is the only such signed copy of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. A rare signed copy thus. Hundreds of color plates. One of the finest American photographers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER STEVE SCHAPIRO TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 1576877639.

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