The Idea of Louis Sullivan / John Szarkowski

In the early 1950s, the young John Szarkowski - long before he gained fame as the most renowned photography curator and critic of the past forty years - made a portfolio of photographs of buildings Sullivan had constructed in Chicago at the turn of that century. He hesitantly showed them to Frank Lloyd Wright, himself a pupil of Sullivan’s, who declared them ‘the best photographs of Sullivan’s buildings that I have ever seen’. With this encouragement, Szarkowski went on to complete his coverage of all the major buildings of Sullivan, indubitably one of the fathers of modern architecture. With a text composed of excerpts from Sullivan’s own statements about architecture, this brilliantly conceived and executed project was modestly published and soon out of print. This new edition, with its updated design and new duotone reproductions prepared by master printers at the Stamperia Valdonega, promises to become a classic in its own right - a collectors’ item for all discerning historians of photography, of architecture and of the making of books.