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Gomes, Alair (Artist/Photographer) & Various Contributors : Alair Gomes

Fondation Cartier Pour L'Art Contemporain, Paris, France, 2001

ISBN 2742731644

First Edition / First Printing. Fine in Fine Dust Jacket. 160 pages. Retrospective collection of male nudes. One of the most beautiful erotic art photography books ever published. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions, including the Brazilian Edition. Published in a small and limited print run by Fondation Cartier as a hardcover original only. This English-Language Edition is exactly the same as the French-Language Edition. The First Edition is now rare. A brilliant production by Fondation Cartier: Oversize-volume format. Metallic-silver hard boards with titles embossed on cover and spine, as issued. Photographs by Alair Gomes. Text by various contributors in felicitous English translations. Printed on pristine-white, thick coated stock paper in Paris, France to the highest standards. In pictorial DJ with titles on the cover and spine, as issued. Published on the occasion of the landmark retrospective exhibition of the same name held at the Fondation Cartier Pour L'Art Contemporain in 2001. Presents "Alair Gomes". A posthumous appreciation of the erotic art photography of the Brazilian Renaissance Man/artist/photographer. "Gomes (1921-1992) was in his 50's when he began to develop a body of photographic work focusing exclusively on the athletic young men to be found on the beach at Rio de Janeiro. This tireless collector of books, pictures, and films decided to transform the thousands of pages of his diaries into images, composing an immense erotic tableau of black-and-white photographs devoted to the beauty of the male body. The most original erotic photography of the past few decades" (Publisher's blurb). Why did this world-class scholar make a sudden swerve to male nude photography? His own answer: "The photographic nude may have outshone all others in the human adventure called art" (Alair Gomes). Gomes' aesthetics capitalize upon the innate voyeurism of photography, that is to say, whether the subject is explicitly sexual or not, photography's gaze is always erotic. As long as he or she is not doing it for the money, every photographer's subject is dictated by his or her own sexual desire: Gomes' images are homoerotic because he was homosexual and as such, drawn to masculinity (rather than femininity). Photographers who are drawn to both masculine and feminine beauty are rare; they are not "bisexual", increasingly a meaningless label, but pansexual. Among other Hitchcockian voyeurisms, Gomes photographed hundreds of Brazilian men using a telescopic camera, without their knowledge or consent. The "trade-off" is that the images expand our collective visual vocabulary, which Alair Gomes' ground-breaking photography does. Their raw, "not-photo-shopped", Latin-American hot-ness has prompted his admirers to say that there was nothing else like it before he came along. At one point, in Europe as well as the United States and even Latin America itself, that was probably the case. Such is Alair Gomes' pervasive (and unacknowledged) influence that we see him everywhere today: In copycat books, massive billboards, glossy magazine advertisements, and of course, the Internet. An absolute "must-have" title for Alair Gomes collectors. This title is a great photography book. This is one of few copies of the First Hardcover/First Printing/English-Language Edition still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. Please note: Copies available online command incredible prices, topping $2000, because the book is rare, especially in fine condition. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare copy thus. 211 duotone plates. One of the greatest photographers of the male nude of the 20th century. A fine collectible copy. . ISBN 2742731644.

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