Ballet

Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet is a legend – one of the most influential and coveted works in the history of the photobook, but so rare that many connoisseurs have never seen a copy of the original edition, much less held it in their own hands. It has been conjured in the imagination and hinted at through documentation, but it remains more of a mystery than a reality for many.

Brodovitch’s aim was to capture dance in the spontaneous, living present. Free of all artistic preconceptions and working with a sense of existential imperative, he immersed himself over a span of five years in the final performances of the Ballets Russes on tour in America. These included productions of Bronislava Nijinska’s “Les Cents Baisers” and “Les Noces;” George Balanchine’s “La Concurrence” and “Cotillon;” and Leonide Massine’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” “Le Tricorne,” “La Boutique Fantasque,” “Septième Symphonie,” and “Choreartium;” as well as “Le Lac des Cygnes” (after Petipa) and “Les Sylphides” (after Fokine). By the time the book was published in 1945, the arc of the revolutionary dance tradition ignited by Sergei Diaghilev and carried on by his artistic heirs had reached its end.

In Ballet, Brodovitch engaged the image and the book form in ways that continue to fascinate. Printing, however, played an equally decisive role in his experiment. He intensified the grain of his photographic film with an experimental gravure printing method that was risky and unpredictable. The improvised process required the printer to be totally engaged in the moment of creation – analogous to a dancer in performance. His every decision and challenge would be captured on the pages. The inking and scraping mechanisms of the rotogravure press were used to mark the action of dance aggressively across the broad spreads of the book, producing images that often resemble drawings more than photographs. Stray smudges, streaks, and blotches of ink were accepted, and even embraced. Plates wore down, and ink levels fluctuated to the extreme. The exact marks left on the pages – which might be considered flaws in a different production context – were not as important as the fact that they were present and visible as honest and spontaneous marks of the moment of creation.

On the eve of the 80th anniversary of the publication of Ballet, Little Steidl’s reissue brings Brodovitch’s masterpiece back to life in all its material intensity with an experimental five-tone printing method developed specially for the project. The bespoke technique, which pushes the technical limits of offset-lithography to extremes, was developed and carried out by Nina Holland with the intention of reanimating not only the visual intensity of the 1945 edition, but also the risk and spontaneity of Brodovitch’s experiment. In a separate booklet accompanying the reissue, Holland and co-editor Joshua Chuang deliver a previously unknown story about the 1945 production – drawn from their forensic study of the original edition – that suggests Brodovitch’s artistic achievement should be viewed not just as one of the highlights, but as a singularly radical work in the history of the photographic book and printing.

Ballet 104 Photographs by Alexey Brodovitch; text by Edwin Denby Reissue of the 1945 edition

Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet was first published in 1945 in an edition of 500 by J. J. Augustin in New York. The process of reconstructing the work is discussed in detail by the editors in the accompanying text booklet.

Book: hardcover (Steifbroschur) with a stitched book block, exposed coverboards, and a buckram-covered spine; French-wrap dust jacket; 28.3 x 21.6 x 2 cm; 144 pages; 104 five-tone images; text in English.

Hand-stitched text booklet: 28 x 21.5 cm; 16 pages; text by the editors in English. Portfolio box: 29.5 x 22.6 x 2.6 cm. Total weight: 1.1 kg / 2.4 lbs.

Editors: Nina Holland and Joshua Chuang Design: Alexey Brodovitch (1945), adapted by Nina Holland (2024) Heidelberg drum scans: Nina Holland / Little Steidl Five-tone separations: Nina Holland / Little Steidl Offset-lithographic printing: Nina Holland / Little Steidl Binding: Sandra Roth / Köhler & Roth Buchbinderei, Rodgau

Publisher: Little Steidl November 2024 ISBN 978-3-944630-07-6 Printed in Germany by Little Steidl

About the imaging and separations This reissue was made using two disassembled copies of the original gravure edition. The gravure prints were scanned on a Heidelberg drum scanner so as to maintain their unique grain structure – a combination of pronounced film grain, the gravure medium, and an experimental gravure printing method. This grain structure was carefully maintained and articulated in the five-tone separations developed for the offset-lithographic reissue.

About the printing The reissue of Ballet was printed by Nina Holland on Little Steidl’s vintage 1993 Roland 200 offset-lithographic press, which has many characteristics in common with the rotogravure press on which the 1945 edition was printed. Both have a maximum print format of approximately 52 x 74 cm, which allowed for an identical imposition of the press sheets in the original and reissue. Moreover, both presses are fully mechanical and controlled solely by the printer. Like its rotogravure predecessor, the Roland 200 has no control board, computer system, or automation, and the printing process unfolds as an intensive collaboration between human and machine. Although each press was considered technologically old-fashioned by the time it was used respectively for the production of the original edition and the reissue, this obsolescence made each suitable for a kind of artistic experimentation that would have been impossible on a more modern machine.

For the reissue, Holland developed a unique five-tone, wet-on-dry printing method to address the intense blacks of the original gravure medium. Deviating from prevailing tritone/quadtone methods, Holland drew from the painting techniques of Chuck Close to structure a wide array of multi-dimensional blacks that are built primarily of carefully-layered greys. Two different blacks were part of the ink set, but were used mainly to structure the reflection/absorption of light.

The accumulated density of the ink layers is extreme and had to be achieved incrementally: each ink was applied individually in one or two passes through the press, then allowed to dry for several days before the next layer was applied. From the third application of ink, Holland rolled and fanned out the sheets in small batches by hand to promote flexibility and prevent them from permanently bonding together. Each sheet of the reissue ran through the press fourteen individual times, and the entire edition required 252 individual runs through the press with a total work time of nine months. The resulting textural detail and tonal diversity cannot be achieved through standard printing methods.

About the binding The reissue follows the design and construction of Brodovitch’s original 1945 edition: a Steifbroschur with a stitched book block of nine sixteen-page signatures; endpapers; grey buckram-wrapped spine; and raw coverboards with a two-millimeter overhang. The book is outfitted with a blue/grey French-wrap dust jacket printed in white. The reissue was bound by master bookbinder Sandra Roth at Köhler & Roth Buchbinderei in Rodgau using the same hybrid hand and machine production that would have been typical of a publisher’s bookbindery in 1945. Roth formed the spines of the books in the traditional manner by hand with two applications of Planatol BB dispersion adhesive, a superior technique than cannot be carried out in today’s industrial in-line binderies.

About the materials The uncoated book paper is Jupp Crääm, produced for Römerturm Feinstpapier. The cylinder-moldmade endpaper is Hahnemühle Pro Arte Ingres. The dustcover paper is f.color, produced by Gmund Papierfabrik for Schabert. All three papers are wood- and acid-free and meet the permanency standards of ISO/DIN 9706. KöhlerBook pH 7.5–9.5 and KöhlerBox pH 7.5–9.5 were used respectively for the coverboards and the portfolio box; both were made on a cylinder-mold paper machine at Köhler Pappen in Gengenbach and are alkaline-buffered to enhance permanence.