Salon #7 – Rare Photobooks

22 November 2015: 10×10 a Rare Photobooks Salon with Eric Miles and Arthur Fournier.

This lively salon-style gathering featured rare book dealer Arthur Fournier and photo-eye auction specialist Eric Miles, who showed and discussed books selected from their incredible inventories.

Arthur Fournier is an independent dealer of books and archives based in Brooklyn, New York. As a bookseller, he specializes in rare and out-of-print graphically illustrated monographs and serials from the second half of the 20th century. His company also works with the estates of avant-garde and underground artists, writers, and publishers to place their archives with institutional libraries.

Arthur brought two European photo serials from the 1970s and 1980s, including Créatis (Paris: 1976-1979) and PS (Stockholm: 1986-1989), as well as the American first wave punk tabloids Slash (Los Angeles: 1977-1980) and New York Rocker (New York: 1976-1984), both of which served as important venues for photographers of the era.

Eric Miles, who has been the director of rare books and online auctions at photo-eye since 2004, focused on important and hard-to-find photobooks as well as prints. Eric is extremely knowledgeable about all areas of photography and art history, and has a particularly strong interest in postwar Japanese and European photobooks. He also writes regularly about photography for print and online publications, advises collectors and does visual consulting for various projects.

Eric shared a global selection of photobooks, which included Robert Frank’s New York Is (1959), Josef Koudelka’s first published work Moral Discourse Today (1965) or Kral Ubu + three programs, the Karel Teige designed ABECEDA (1926), Shuntaro Tanikawa’s E-Hon (1956)… Eric also brought some surprise books.