BURKE + NORFOLK: PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN BY JOHN BURKE AND SIMON NORFOLK

London, England: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2011. First Edition. First Printing.. Hardcover. As New/No Dust Jacket, As Issued.. London, England: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2011. Hardcover. As New/None, As Issued. First Edition/First Printing. 168 pages. Juxtaposition of vintage and contemporary photographs. One of the most valuable and beautiful 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. The First Edition is now scarce. A brilliant production by Dewi Lewis and Simon Norfolk: Oversize-volume format. Blue cloth boards with gilt titles embossed on the cover and spine and black cloth overboards, as issued. Photographs by John Burke and Simon Norfolk. Text by Paul Lowe, Simon Norfolk, and David Campbell. Printed on pristine-white, thick coated stock paper by EBS in Verona, Italy to the highest standards. Without DJ, as issued. Presents Simon Norfolk's "Burke + Norfolk". The photographer's specialty: "Archaeological" layerings that illuminate the human condition. "In 2010, Simon Norfolk returned to Afghanistan. This time, he followed in the footsteps of the 19th-century Irish photographer John Burke, a superb yet virtually unknown war photographer. Burke's eloquent and beautiful photographs of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880) provide an extraordinary record. Using unwieldy wet-plate collodion negatives and huge wooden cameras he shot landscapes, battlefields, archaeological sites, street scenes, portraits of British officers, and ethnological group portraits of Afghans in what amount to a richly detailed record of an Imperial encounter. These are also the first-ever pictures made in Afghanistan. With this book, one hundred and thirty years too late, John Burke's time has come at last. Norfolk's new work looks at what happens when you add half a trillion US war dollars to an impoverished and broken country such as Afghanistan" (Publisher's blurb) . Mikhail Bakhtin coined the word "chronotope" to describe "a place that allows movement through space and time simultaneously, a place that displays the layeredness of time". Norfolk's "chronotopic" project is to turn time into space so that we can "see" time. "Afghanistan has been ravaged by war. The Soviet Union, the Mujaheddin, the Taliban, and the United States have all played their part. Afghanistan is unique, utterly unlike any other war-ravaged landscape. In Bosnia, Dresden, or the Somme, the devastation appears to have taken place within one period of time. The sheer length of the war in Afghanistan means the ruins have a bizarre layering: Different moments of destruction lying like sedimentary strata on top of each other" (Simon Norfolk) . An absolute "must-have" title for John Burke and Simon Norfolk collectors. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed and dated (in the month and year of publication) in black ink-pen by the photographer: "Simon Norfolk May 2011". It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a contemporary art photography classic. As far as we know, this is the only such signed and publication-month dated copy of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. A rare signed copy thus. 100 plates. Simon Norfolk's "Afghanistan: Chronotopia" (2002) is regarded as one of the greatest photography books of our time. A fine copy. . ISBN 1907893113.