Kind of Rapture, A
by: Bergman, Robert

Hardcover. New York , Pantheon, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 60 pages. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. For more than ten years, Robert Bergman--a brilliant artist who has purposefully withheld himself from the mainstream--traveled by car with two friends, for months at a time, throughout the Rust Belt (Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Gary) and the East Coast, taking color pictures of everyday people who moved him profoundly. Even as he used a simple 35-mm camera, amateur film, no tripod, and no special lighting, his was a monumental, Whitmanesque project: to document the physical appearance and spirit of Americans, and to gauge the climate of our times. A Kind of Rapture, which is certain to be a classic work of photography, brings together the first selection from Bergman's epic enterprise. Having taken, developed, and printed his own pictures since the age of five, Bergman has now, for A Kind of Rapture, created his own color separations, using high-resolution digital equipment, in an effort to exercise more control over the quality of reproduction than photographers have ever had. Bergman and his colleagues have helped define a new paradigm for art-book publishing--each and every image in this book is extraordinary for its fidelity to the artistic sensibility that informs its original print.