WALL STREET

First edition. Hardcover issue. Signed by the author. Oblong quarto. Publisher's original black cloth over boards with title lettering in silver to upper panel. Light rubbing to the extremities but certainly a near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout and without previous owner's inscriptions or stamps. With an introduction by A. D. Coleman.

Limited edition of 700 copies, around 550 of which were issued in paperback. This copy one of scarce hardcover issue, numbered 320 and signed by Charles Gatewood in black ink on the title page. A superb volume that deserves a wider audience. Gatewood is best known as a photographer who documents the sexual underground and helped launch the Modern Primitives meme into popular consciousness. This, however, is undoubtedly his best book, and one of the notable American photo books of modern times. Unlike his other work that emphasises sexuality and the idiosyncrasies and weirdness of human existence, these images are ethereal, formal and emotionally void with an underlying theme of capitalism and control. "Wall Street" illustrates the message that it may be money and high finance which constitute the real obscenity of our age. The black and white concrete desolation of these photographs provide a set of visual metaphors for that most secretive perversion of all, high finance.