Very good, corners lightly bumped, short tear to upper paper cover at joint, spine marked ‘Lyon Design’ in yellow, offsetting to title from portfolio, occasional fading and chipping to extremities of plates never effecting the image area.
With the publication of Métal in 1928, the German-born photographer Germaine Krull established herself at ‘forefront of radical modernism’, creating ‘one of the key modernist photobooks’ (Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook).
‘Krull entered the art world at the precise moment when photography, in particular, was transforming itself from pictorialism into the experimental and abstracting conception of the New Vision… liberated from traditional female photographer’s roles [she] seized the opportunity to reflect and actively shape the Machine Age…’ (Kim Sichel, Germaine Krull: photographer of modernity). ‘Her machine photographs and Métal in particular, deconstructed the synchronous assembly line celebrated by… the politicians of the interwar years and created instead a new industrial symbol of partial, poetic, and highly charged industrial fragments’ (Kim Sichel, Contortions of Technique: Germaine Krull’s Experimental Photography).
Across 64 photographs reproduced in collotype, Métal presents a dazzling array of machinery, including bicycles, electrical generators, drive-belts, cargo cranes, and vertiginous images of the Eiffel tower shot from a worm’s-eye view. Several of these images, among others, were published separately in the French illustrated weekly magazine VU**,** but Krull was among the first to understand the artistic potential of the photobook as a whole. As much a filmmaker as a photographer, having been closely involved in the Dutch avant-garde Filmliga group, Krull appropriated the cinematic montage techniques of friends such as Sergei Eisenstein to produce ‘suites of images that approximated the city symphony films of these colleagues’ (Kim Sichel, Germaine Krull: photographer of modernity).
Métal exists as a sequence of numbered plates, suggesting a particular viewing order but one which is never contiguous; of the eleven images of the Eiffel Tower none are adjacent. The effect produces ‘the kind of montage that her friend Walter Benjamin championed, in which “the superimposed element disrupts the context in which it is inserted… The discovery is accomplished by means of the interruption of sequences”’ (Kim Sichel, Contortions of Technique: Germaine Krull’s Experimental Photography). Krull embraced the essential act of turning a photobook’s pages, offering both the promise of sequence and the potential to disrupt it, to further her filmmaker’s vision of ‘rupture and “visual counterpoint,” involving graphic, planar, volumetric, and spatial conflicts’ (ibid.)
Man Ray put it simply when crossing paths with her in Paris: “Germaine, you and I are the greatest photographers of our time, I in the old sense you in the modern one.” Today, Métal is considered to be ‘the finest example of a modernist photobook in the dynamic, cinematic mode.’ (Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook)
