William P. Gottlieb — Burn Lower Left — Book

The book

In 1938 William P. Gottlieb traded hundreds of records for a Speed Graphic press camera. It took two sheets of film, and so two exposures; he kept each session to three or four shots. The choosing happened before the shutter was released.

This book is about the choosing that came after. Picture by picture, the whole negative, the contact print annotated in grease pencil and tape, and the photograph as it was published, where the Library keeps them, put back together from the scans of the Library of Congress: what was kept, what was cut, and the orders to the printer, transcribed word for word.

Why this book is different

The Library of Congress describes what its Gottlieb collection makes possible: “One can follow the artist’s work process by examining first a raw negative, then an annotated contact print, and finally a finished, published product.” This book puts that process on paper. Each spread is one picture. On the left, the negative, as the Library scanned it, without the edge of the film; on it, a pale frame shows what was published, found by matching the published print to the negative, and the colored marks from the contact print are traced where they fall. On the right, the contact print itself, the published picture, and the orders transcribed word for word.

Twenty photographs, grouped by the kind of decision each one shows: Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Django Reinhardt, Thelonious Monk and others. It is a selection with one route through it, not a catalogue: fewer pages, one question, every page there for a reason.

The object

A hardcover book, printed on Mohawk Superfine: a 120 gsm uncoated art paper with a soft matte surface, heavier than a magazine page and without the shine of a photo book. The cover is matte-laminated. Landscape A4, 66 pages, in English.

It is printed to order in the USA when you buy it, one copy at a time.

Photographs from the William P. Gottlieb/Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress; in accordance with the wishes of William Gottlieb, the photographs entered the public domain on February 16, 2010. Other images credited page by page. Published independently by Métrica; not affiliated with the institutions credited.

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