TELEX PERSAN/TELEX IRAN: IN THE NAME OF REVOLUTION by Peress, Gilles (Photographer) & Sa'edi Gholam-Hossein (Contribution) - 1983

Paris, France: Contrejour, 1983. First Edition. First Printing.. Softcover. As New/No Dust Jacket, As Issued.. Paris, France: Contrejour, 1983. Softcover. As New/None, As Issued. First Edition/First Printing. 104 pages. Retrospective collection of photographs. One of the greatest photography books of the 20th century. The First Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions, including the Aperture Edition, which is based on it. The First Edition is now rare. A brilliant production by Gilles Peress and Claude Nori: Oversize-volume format. Glossy pictorial softcovers with titles on the cover and spine, as issued. Photographs and text by Gilles Peress. His telexes are brilliantly reproduced at the bottom of the images, and give an urgency not only to the photographs but to the life of one restless photojournalist living in a foreign land from day to day. Essay by Gholam-Hossein Sa'edi appended at the end. Printed on pristine-white, thick uncoated stock paper in Paris, France to the highest standards. In publisher's original inner plastic and outer paper shrinkwrap. Without DJ, as issued. Presents, in its ultimate collectible format, Gilles Peress' "Telex Persan". The greatest photographic account ever produced by a Western photojournalist of the Iranian post-revolutionary situation. Peress was appalled by the one-sided and heavily propagandistic American coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis. With money from the National Endowment for the Arts, he flew to Iran on virtually a whim and photographed what he saw, experienced, and felt during a five-week period, from December 1979 through January 1980. The resulting images were lavished with praise and with a rare unanimity: "A book of brilliant visual nervousness between covers" (Cornell Capa). "I appreciate so much the visual strength of Gilles Peress' photographs. They depict an Iran so different from the one I knew through reading and my travels" (Henri Cartier-Bresson). Apart from the sheer vitality of the images, the book has become a landmark in photographic book design, and has lost none of its daring innovativeness, impeccable beauty, and palpable immediacy. There is a fluidity to Peress' images that could only have come from his intuitive genius. Peress may never have read Canetti's great book on crowds, "Crowds And Power". But his book is the closest thing photography has ever achieved to capturing groups in action. "To the crowd in its nakedness everything seems a Bastille" (Elias Canetti). An absolute "must-have" title for Gilles Peress collectors. <b><i> This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed in black pen-marker on the front free endpaper by Gilles Peress. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. It is also magnificently titled, signed, and dated in metallic-silver pen-marker on the publisher's outer black paper wrap by the photographer: "Telex: Persan Gilles Peress 2006". The signature glows radiantly against the light. This title is a great photography book. As far as we know, this is the only such signed, titled, and dated copy of the First Edition/First Printing available online, is still in the publisher's original shrinkwrap (both the inner plastic and the outer paper), and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. A rare signed copy thus. </b></i> 100 plates. Gilles Peress' "Telex: Iran" was selected as one of the greatest photography books in "The Photobook". One of the greatest photojournalists of our time. A fine collectible copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER GILLES PERESS TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 3931141365.