Rimbaud in New York (1978-79)

By David Wojnarowicz, text by Tom Rauffenbart and Andrew Roth. Original Essay by Jim Lewis, PPP Editions, New York, 2004. First edition limited to 1.000 copies. Text in English. Unpaginated (106 pages), 29 x 22 cm. Condition : Excellent (as new).

Out of stock

Wojnarowicz was a young artist who in 1978-1979 (then age 24) undertook a series of photographs in Manhattan. In 1990, he printed a small portfolio of 25 images for an exhibition at the PPOW gallery in New York. Wojnarowicz died prematurely in 1992. He left behind an archival collection of 44 black and white photographs which had been bequeathed to the Fales Library at New York University.

 

Each photograph from the Rimbaud in New York series presents a lone figure, presumably Wojnarowicz himself, in and around New York City — 42nd Street, the Meat Market, Coney Island – wearing a mask portraying the visage of the young Romantic poet, Arthur Rimbaud. The Rimbaud portrait comes from the only known photograph of him made by the renown 19th-century French portrait photographer Etienne Carjat.

 

It is a meeting between the city of all the excess and dark that was then New York and the poetic bohemia of one of the greatest poets in history. An imagined, fantasized but coherent meeting