African Mirage: The Record of a Journey

New York/London: Charles Scribner's Sons / B.T. Batsford Ltd.. Near Fine in Very Good dj. 1938. First Edition. Hardcover. [a nice copy, minor shelfwear, a touch of soiling along top edges of spine and rear cover; the jacket has some general overall wear to edges and surface, with various tiny nicks along the top edge and shallow chipping at the top of the spine (removing most of "AFRICAN" from the title thereon), which is also a bit faded]. (B&W photographs) A heavily photo-illustrated travelogue (126 images, per the jacket blurb) recounting the author-photographer's journey throughout Equatorial Africa, ranging "through Egypt, the Sudan, Kenya, the (truncated) Belgian Congo, French Equatorial Africa, British Nigeria, and back by the Southern Sahara," during which he trained his camera primarily on the lives of the indigenous people. And the Russian-born Hoyningen-Huene wasn't some run-of-the-mill lenser: he was already well established as one of the world's leading portrait and fashion photographers, having been the chief of photography at French Vogue magazine since 1925, and having eventually (during the 1930s) relocated from Paris to New York, where he worked for Harper's Bazaar and does advertising photography. This was Hoyningen-Huene's first book, and while perhaps not quite what one might have expected for someone who had made his name in the rarefied air of the high-fashion world, it's evident that he didn't leave his aesthetic at home when he ventured into Darkest Africa (as they used to call it): in his brief Preface, he admits to having "purposely omitted all sordidness of realism in my photographs," preferring instead to concentrate "on the plastic and heroic side of an Africa which is slowly disappearing," lamenting that one day "the entire Black Continent [will be] clothed and reduced to comparative banality." Post-World War II, Hoyningen-Huene would gravitate to Southern California, where in addition to his photography career he worked as a color consultant on a number of Hollywood films, including several for director George Cukor. Jacketed copies of this book are most uncommon. . (Inventory #: 28542)