Wall Street

By Charles Gatewood, Sun in Scorpio, New York, 1984. First edition (one of 700 copies, unsigned). Non-paginated (70 pages). 27.6 x 22.8 cm. Condition: Very good (very light wear on the back).

250€

Rare book by American photographer and writer Charles Gatewood (1942-2016) who notably edited in 1975  with William Burroughs a fantastic book entitled Sidetripping (Strawberry Hill Publishing) on the subject of avant-garde circles. Here, Gatewood takes for a subject a more “serious” universe: the financial district of Wall Street in Manhattan. The photographer takes the wrong idea that one might expect of this nerve center of the global economy. You can hardly see anyone there (no crowd of brokers, or over-powered trading rooms) or else they are isolated, almost lost in a cold, immense and rectilinear universe. It is a very poetic bias that gives this book great beauty. The subject is not so much money even if certain subtle winks remind us of it, but a strange feeling of isolation.