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Author: Duncan, David Douglas
Title: Nine original photographs from David Douglas Duncan's Self Portrait U.S.A. - with production marks
Place Published: [New York]
Publisher:[Harry N. Abrams]
Date Published: [1969]
Description: 9 gelatin silver prints, 5 of which mounted on boards, many with red stamp reading "Duncan Self Port". Several with grease pen circles and marks for touch-ups or crops.Production photographs from David Douglas Duncan's 1969 book Self Portrait U.S.A. with crop marks and production instructions lending extra immediacy, as though history were emerging as the book was going to press. Self Portrait U.S.A. was a landmark photobook documenting the rot that had begun to undermine the foundations of American society in the late 1960's. Setting photographs of the ersatz Americans attending the Republican National Convention in Miami and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in contrast to the very real mayhem outside the Democratic National Convention, Duncan shows the reader a "self-portrait" of an ugly America through and through – proud angry bigots, snarling riot police dogs, J. Edgar Hoover, etc. A war photographer come home to fighting in the streets, Duncan juxtaposes a soldiers' ward with patients recovering from grievous wounds suffered in Vietnam – and Alfred E. Neuman for President banners on their bedposts – with images of other young people, who had been clubbed by police batons, being treated in bloody makeshift triage at Senator McCarthy's headquarters. One African American soldier sleeps under a memorial to the recently assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. Captioning this photograph in the book, Duncan states "Turning to leave the ward, I asked the night duty-officer an obvious question: 'How many delegates or candidates, Democrats or Republicans, have come here to visit with these men?' He looked across their beds, then switched off the light. 'Not one.'" - Self-Portrait U.S.A., p. 184. An extraordinary collection of photographs taken during a period of modern American crisis – aftershocks of which are felt to this day. "My pictures are offered here as a national profile – a big-family photo album – made during the Republican and Democratic conventions. At that time, for a few hot summer days, many of the forces that stagnate, rend and torment or embarrass us, as well as those that give promise of making ours a finer Republic in the future, were on the surface – festering wounds amid silken complexions – for everyone to see. It was a great moment for an old war photographer to return home...to aim his camera at America." - David Douglas Duncan, Self-Portrait U.S.A.

Condition varies with a few scratches and light edgewear; some photographs have come unglued from their mounts or are partially unglued; very good or better.