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Author: Gauthier, Lucien
Title: Taïti
Place Published: [Papeete?]
Publisher:L. Gauthier
Date Published: [1907?]
Description:

[2] pp. Illustrated with 12 plates, each featuring numerous photo-gravures (from photos by Gauthier) set within colorful art nouveau borders (by Rocher) (Oblong 4to) 21.5x27.7 cm (8½x11"), color pictorial wrappers with a photo mounted on the front cover, bound with cloth cord, all leaves mounted on tissue paper stubs.

A rare album composed of 31 photographs of Lucien Gauthier, reproduced by
photomechanical process, although a small original gelatin silver bromide print of a panoramic view of the port of Papeete is mounted on the front cover. The
cover and each sheet are decorated with stencil compositions by E. Rocher, "draftsman in Paris" in the Art Nouveau style. Rocher's work is tinged with exoticism and serves as a frame for the photographs, which are themselves contemporary examples of "fin de siècle exoticism", with its young people in colorful clothes, bathing in the paradisiacal sources of the island and playing the flute by moonlight. OCLC locates three holdings – two in New Zealand, which date this work, certainly erroneously as 1930, and one in French Polynesia.

Born in Paris, as a young man Lucien Gauthier (1875-1971) boarded a ship bound for Tahiti, where he opened a photography studio in 1904 [a year after Gaughin's death]. Gauthier became known for his landscapes and portraits of the inhabitants and he created some photo-essays for the famous Paris magazine, L'Illustration. His work is emblematic of a "conventional exoticism" that seeks to reconnect with the Polynesian myth: "Le travail de Gauthier tente tardivement et presque anachroniquement de rechercher l'aspect unificateur du mythe ; la pérennité du thème de l'éden, la cristallisation de nos propres aspirations dans une universalité feinte se heurtant aux acquis culturels d'une société industrielle" (Jean-Yves Thréhin. Tahiti. L'éden à l'épreuve de la photographie. Gallimard, 2003, pp. 149-159). Much of Gauthier's work is reproduced in Serge Kakou's recent collection, Tahitian Beauties: Lucien Gauthier, photographer (2009). Gauthier left the island in 1921.

Some wear to wrappers, overall very good.