Performing Print: Nina Holland and Joshua Chuang discuss Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet

Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet was published in an edition of 500 by J. J. Augustin in 1945, but the book was not issued to the trade in the traditional sense. Rather, it appears that Brodovitch retained the edition and personally gave out copies to friends, students, and colleagues. Much of the edition was destroyed in a fire at his home in 1956; the copies Brodovitch distributed himself are the survivors. The exact number of extant copies is unknown, but it is far less than the initial print run.

Brodovitch took the photographs between 1935 and 1939 during tours of the Ballets Russes to New York. His relationship to the revolutionary dance movement, however, began much earlier circa 1920 in Paris during Sergei Diaghilev’s reign, before the company’s migration to Monte Carlo and its eventual split and reorganization into two companies. Brodovitch’s longstanding fascination with the creativity of movement and rhythm was at the heart of this photographic project, and he freed himself of all rules and expectations to capture in a visual form the unique dance language of the Ballets Russes. In this pursuit, he engaged both the image and the book form in ways that continue to astonish.

Ballet was Brodovitch’s only book of his own work. It remains a critically important document of dance history. Despite its rarity and lack of commercial distribution, it has had a profound impact among photographers and on the development of the photobook. The aim of the following discussion is to reveal a story that has not yet been told about the book’s experimental production history and to provide the reader with an understanding of how we approached the first reissue of this legendary work.

Nina Holland and Joshua Chuang
Göttingen, 2024

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About Gravure Printing

In the gravure printing method, a continuous-tone photographic image is chemically etched into a plate along with a microscopic structure of walled recesses, or cells, that function to hold ink on the plate. Under pressure, the ink is transferred from the plate to paper. The ink cells are typically uniform in size but vary in depth to produce a full tonal range in the print from light to dark. The shallowest recesses hold the least ink and produce the lightest areas of the print; the deepest recesses hold the most ink and produce the rich blacks associated with the medium.

The recessed structure of the gravure plate is created by preparing the plate with an aquatint grain or by exposing a gravure grid along with the image. In both methods, one sees under magnification individual cells of varying tonalities—the characteristic that defines true gravure. With the graining technique, the tiny recesses are randomly distributed, as opposed to the uniform structure of cells produced by the gravure grid.

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JC: We refer to our edition of Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet as a reissue, rather than a facsimile. Another term could be reconstruction. How would you articulate the difference?

NH: Both reissue and reconstruction connote an act of interpretation and creation. The term facsimile denotes an exact copy, an idea as problematic as it is impossible. It addresses only how something looks superficially. In contrast, we’ve approached the book as a complex material object to be faithfully reconstructed rather than just represented as image.

JC: The production context has changed since 1945. Printing and imaging technologies, papers, inks, and type are different. The original edition has also changed: the pigments in the paper dyes have faded, and the book paper has discolored, which has affected the tonality of the images. We referred to four copies of the original edition and disassembled two of them as the source material for our reconstruction. We considered carefully which elements to carry forward and which to leave behind. Perhaps the most significant change in the reissue is the print medium. The original was gravure, but you printed this reissue in offset lithography. Readers will naturally be curious about the similarities and differences.

NH: The content of the work encompasses the original images, text, titles, book design, and materials, all of which carry forward into the reissue. I’ll lay out very quickly the points of comparison, and then we can discuss in depth the more complex research that informs our interpretation.

First, the images: I disassembled two copies of the original and scanned each image on my Heidelberg drum scanner, capturing the microscopic structure of the original gravure prints. For each image, I selected the better print from the two books, taking almost equally from each copy. In the reissue, I printed the images in offset lithography in their original size and sequence. The underlying structure of the original gravure prints is maintained and visible in the offset prints. Unintentional flaws and scratches from the earlier production are eliminated, while intentional marks are preserved. To maintain the full-bleed images without cropping them, I reconstructed the three-millimeter trim around each image, which is cut off during binding.

Next, the text elements: The essay written by Edwin Denby and the back matter are identical in content, including editing inconsistencies and less conventional spellings of Russian names. In the original, all text was printed in gravure from letterpress proofs. In the reissue, I reset all text based on the layout of the original, with minor alterations to improve legibility, and printed in offset lithography. The various display titles are reproduced from the original with some restoration. The folios, which are part of the images, are placed inconsistently in relation to the page edge in the original—stemming from errors on the gravure press. These inconsistencies are maintained in the reissue.

Last, the binding: The reissue follows Brodovitch’s original design—a Steifbroschur consisting of a stitched book block of nine sixteen-page signatures, grey buckram-covered spine, endpapers, and exposed bookbinder’s boards with a two-millimeter square, or overhang. The original French-wrap dustcover is reconstructed with minor adjustments at the spine and corners. The flaps—which were tacked together with glue in the original edition—are left unglued in the reissue. These alterations improve durability. I printed the wrap in white ink on a blue-grey dyed paper, as in the 1945 edition. The color of the paper, however, can only approximate the now faded original. The materials used are consistent overall: uncoated papers with similar grammages and volumes. The warm-white paper tone is comparable to the original paper when it was new. All materials in the reissue are archival, in contrast to the relatively poor quality of the original papers and boards.

JC: One aspect of the original design we did not carry forward is the slipcase with front and spine labels printed in ultramarine blue. Deviations among the few survivors have raised more questions than answers. The materials have faded and disintegrated so significantly that we cannot determine, to our satisfaction, how the slip-case looked when new or how it was manufactured. The blue of the labels, however, presented a visual charge in the original that I felt should not be completely left behind. How to incorporate this colored text element without overstepping was a critical question.

NH: The slipcase as a housing was also unsuitable for the delicate French wrap. Abrasion and off-gassing caused the wrap to tear and fade. The slipcase was vertical in orientation, so the book slid in and out on its spine. For the reissue we developed a simple, protective portfolio box and printed the front and spine titles directly on the board in ultramarine. The book is lifted out, so there is no friction between the materials. It is a protective housing that gives a clue about that important blue, but it is not an element of the original design.

Moving on to the more complex issues, we also investigated how Brodovitch shaped each element of the work—his techniques, choices, intentions, and maybe also mistakes. The content is the what and the manifestation is the how—the performance of the content. I would draw an analogy to a musical score, which lays out the content of a work. A performer then gives the work notated in the score a specific sensory form.

JC: In the original, Brodovitch was both the creator of the content and the performer, in the sense that he made the decisions about how the work would be rendered. The idea of a reconstruction implies that the content can be performed again, by a different performer. What does this say in general about the status of a first edition? There’s an assumption that it’s the purest manifestation of an artist’s intentions. But that can be more fetish than reality.

NH: In every other artistic discipline that involves a creator and a performer—music, dance, theater—we accept the idea that a work can be re-performed. When different musicians perform the same work, we don’t say they are creating copies or facsimiles. We recognize and value the role of the performer, sometimes even more than the work being performed. A book is usually made by someone who is not the creator, but rather the performer of the content. The artist often has limited access to production and may know little about the technical processes or artistry that bring a book to life. It would be absurd to suggest that a rendition or a performance is the best because it’s the first. There is always space to grow and to improve. Circumstances can become more favorable for a work over time.

JC: Robert Frank’s The Americans comes to mind as an example of this. For the first edition from Delpire in 1958, the artist made major concessions, accepting the publisher’s choice of cover illustration and texts. For the Grove Press edition a year later, Frank chose his New Orleans trolley image for the jacket cover, added an introduction by Jack Kerouac, and replaced all the other text with individual image captions. Both the Delpire and Grove editions were printed in gravure. Fifty years later, Frank used the Grove Press edition as a basis for his Steidl reissue of The Americans, printed in offset lithography. Gerhard Steidl went to great lengths to bring Frank into the production and design process to ensure the artist’s satisfaction.

An exception to the notion that second chances yield better results is the first edition of Walker Evans’ American Photographs, published in 1938 to accompany his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Evans conceived of the book quite differently than the show, and paid a great deal more attention to the quality of the letterpress printing of his pictures in the book than to the prints on the walls. He had the engraver painstakingly rework the letterpress plates by hand, so extensively that in some cases the tonal structure of the prints in the book is dramatically different than that of the gelatin silver prints he made at the time, which were generally denser. It was not a matter of achieving fidelity to the original—the original was being created by Evans on the pages on the book, and in my view, the letterpress rendition of his photographs in that book has not been surpassed as a conveyance of what was at stake in his work. It’s even conceivable that Evans thought of those letterpress prints as the way his work should look, since the silver prints of these images he later made resemble the plates in the book more so than any vintage prints.

NH: In Ballet we find some parallels both to Evans’ intervention in the production process as well as his approach to the book as an original print work, although the artistic intent, outcome, and character of Brodovitch’s experiment with print production couldn’t be more different. We can ascribe some very unusual production decisions to Brodovitch personally, some of which had errant or precarious outcomes. It’s critical to distinguish in this case between intent and outcome because they don’t always align. But, even more importantly, sometimes they do. One of our initial questions was: Who was responsible for the book production? Was it Brodovitch or the publisher, J. J. Augustin?

JC: We suspected that Ballet was a self-funded and self-published project that simply bore the insignia of the publisher. In this case, Brodovitch had developed a number of publications with J. J. Augustin, but Ballet is unlike any of them. And a publisher doesn’t generally hand over an entire edition to be stored in the artist’s barn. Our suspicions were confirmed by the artist’s nephew, Michel Brodovitch, who also points out that in the mid-1940s his uncle would have been in a position to fund the project.

NH: We researched the publisher’s catalogue extensively and compared the production of many titles made both in Germany and in New York to the production of Ballet. At every turn, Ballet was an outlier—subject, genre, design, materials, production. The amateurish typesetting of Denby’s essay was the first obvious sign that J. J. Augustin had nothing to do with the book production. The typographic mistakes were so severe that they alone would have been cause for this particular publisher to reject the book. The New York-based operation was the offspring of a prestigious historic German printer/publisher—unparalleled masters of typesetting in more than 100 languages, both living and dead. During World War II, J. J. Augustin, a son of the publishing family, sought out the best letterpress printers for his publications in America.

JC: Although typography is not the most important element in the book, it was among the first things we debated for this new edition: would we have to reproduce this typographic train wreck or could we reset the text to make it more legible? It’s astonishing how difficult it is to read the essay in the original edition. When we transcribed the text, it was agonizing to just make my way through a line and find the beginning of the next line. Sometimes it took two or three attempts. But there were also a few instances when we actually debated which word was intended because the chopped-off letters made certain words unrecognizable.

NH: The original typesetting was a disservice to Denby and his wonderful essay. The Linotype Bodoni typeface is generally very difficult to read as body type, but Brodovitch’s standard was also a mismatch for gravure. The etching process ate away the edges and hairline strokes of the letterforms and reduced significantly the text weight intended by Brodovitch. Then the amateur typesetter forgot the interline spacing (leading) between a number of consecutive lines of text. The original text was too compromised for reproduction as an image. I had to reset it. The most difficult question was whether I could deviate from the excessive text-column width, which also impeded legibility. Brodovitch designed his text blocks primarily as visual elements in relationship to images, even if this impaired the functionality of the text. The wide text block in Ballet—rooted in this practice—seemed to me to be inviolable. I could, however, make some modest improvements. I used a cut of Bodoni designed by Günter Gerhard Lange for Berthold that’s significantly more legible, and the elimination of typesetting errors made a noticeable difference. In any event, we’ve also included a strip of book paper in the reissue that can be used as a visual aid to cover up lines as they are read.

JC: Coming to this project, we knew that Ballet was printed in gravure. But at an early stage in our investigations, you noticed something that was not only unexpected but also significantly out of step with developments in printing and publishing at the time.

NH: Yes, I was expecting to see a gravure grid when I inspected the images with a loupe. This would have been typical of rotogravure book production of that time, and certainly expected for a book on the scale of Ballet. But I was surprised to find instead a continuous random grain structure throughout the prints. This indicates grained gravure plates, which are typically used for hand-pulled gravure prints on a flat-bed etching press. But Ballet was not hand-pulled gravure. The book was too extensive for this method. On the other hand, grained plates were not typical in rotogravure production. The grained plate is considered too fragile in this production context. It was a riddle.

I eventually confirmed the book was printed on a small rotary gravure press outfitted with thin, flexible copper printing plates. The grained plates were not ideal in this context. It was risky and experimental. After examining many contextual details surrounding Brodovitch’s professional work and production contacts, it appeared that this precarious combination of grained plates on a cylinder press was intentional. The decision is central to understanding the artistic intentions behind the book.

JC: What would have been typical for a J. J. Augustin book?

NH: In all other collaborations with Brodovitch, the images were printed using newly patented gravure methods or in gridded gravure with all text printed in letterpress. The academic publications followed a house style with text in letterpress and images in halftone engraving. Ballet stands alone in its willfully expressionistic and experimental approach to printing. Not just among the books of J. J. Augustin, but in publishing in general.

JC: Early in our forensic study of the book, we noticed other flaws in addition to the typography, some of them quite serious. On several pages the white paper was exposed at the edges of full-bleed images. The inconsistent margin around the folios was another hint that something was not under control during the production of the book. But the turning point really came when you compared the printing across four different copies of the original book. That confirmed your hunch that we were looking at grained gravure plates on a rotary press, and the missing pieces in the story of how the book was made began to fall into place.

NH: I was comparing our two copies of the original against two copies that had come directly from the publishing house via the library at the University of Hamburg. Right in the first images, I was startled to see that a large expanse of the floor was missing in one of the university’s copies. What should have been the highlight areas in the image were simply not there, despite being clearly present in our copies of the book. I continued to compare page against page, and found more examples of missing highlight areas.

JC: And you were puzzled. At first you told me that you were seeing serious deviations in the printing. You said that if the prints had been duotones or tritones—which they weren’t—then you would have thought that someone had forgotten to print a grey plate. That wasn’t what happened, but it was clear that something significant was missing from certain images and that the affected pages were always contained within a signature, meaning that they would have come from a common plate and press sheet.

NH: Yes, there was a pattern that made mechanical sense. I could pinpoint the plate as the culprit. Certain plates—at least two—had worn down in the highlight areas before reaching the end of the print run, in other words, somewhere short of 500 good copies. And to fulfill the edition, certain sheets were included that would have otherwise not made the cut. That is the consequence of grained plates on a rotary press. Of course, the nature of the images is forgiving, and the defective pages have gone unnoticed. Or the missing areas of the prints have been interpreted as intentional. When I realized what had happened, I looked at each of the monographs that reproduce the spreads of Ballet and, indeed, a couple of the source copies that were photographed for these various books included a number of images that had been printed with worn-out plates.

JC: The original book is so scarce, it’s nearly impossible to track down a flawless copy. But it’s confounding to think that the books that have reproduced spreads from Ballet for a wider audience are sometimes based on copies with significant printing errors.

NH: Yes, about half of the source copies have these errors. But honestly, I’m more concerned that someone’s only access to the work would be through reproduced photographs of the spreads because these often deviate significantly from the original book. For example, they are printed on coated papers with severe adjustments to both the highlights and shadows. The tonality and haptic qualities of the original are lost in this context. The printing inconsistencies that occurred across the original edition did not seem to cause Brodovitch concern. From an aesthetic standpoint, they are in line with the photographic approach. On the other hand, he did consciously choose a printing process and materials with very specific aesthetic characteristics that cannot be represented in documentary photographs of the book.

JC: When you first explained that the plates had worn down, I was surprised. Five hundred sheets is not a huge run on a rotary press—how could the plates wear down so quickly?

NH: That’s the fragility of the grained plate. Only the highlight areas of the plate wore down. This was the primary clue for me. These are the shallowest areas of the plate, and they wear down first. Where the grain structure wears down, the plate cannot hold ink and nothing can be transferred to the paper. That area will be blank in the print. The tiny granular recesses in the plate’s surface are very fragile. In the typical production context, that is, on a flat-bed press, a grained plate is inked and cleaned by hand, and the editions are much smaller. In contrast, on a rotary press, a metal doctor blade scrapes the plate clean with every revolution of the plate cylinder and will wear down a grained surface quickly. It’s not a standard technique, so we don’t have a comparison. But based on what we see in Ballet, a print run of 500 copies was approaching or even a little beyond the maximum for a grained gravure plate on a rotary press.

The printing in Ballet demonstrates why the gravure grid was developed for rotary production. It gives the printing plate a more consistent and durable surface and cell wall structure for the doctor blade. And by 1945 when Ballet was made, even the traditional grid method was considered problematic for larger print runs. Several new patented techniques had been introduced to provide additional surface durability and were already in use in the fashion and publishing industries and at J. J. Augustin.

JC: The idea that this book stands almost as an example of what not to do seems fitting, given what we know about Brodovitch and his iconoclastic style of teaching.

NH: I agree, and the deliberateness of Brodovitch’s decisions make Ballet even more extraordinary than we first realized. Even though we were guided to this discovery through our investigation of obvious flaws, the choice of printing process itself was not a mistake. Unpredictable and unstable, yes. But this was no mistake. We can ascertain this based on Brodovitch’s position, exposure, and access to the most advanced printing methods of the time.

The idea of breaking rules comes up often in discussions of Ballet. But I’m not convinced. Rather, I sense that Brodovitch was oblivious to rules and couldn’t have cared less. He had a higher pursuit: the Ballets Russes—a tradition that appears to have encompassed, for Brodovitch, pure life and vitality even while it was coming to an end. Existential imperative is at the heart of the project, and Brodovitch freed himself to think only about his artistic pursuit without the obstacles that come along with rules and technique. This is different than breaking rules. The printing technique should be regarded in this light.

JC: We’re both very fond of Denby’s essay in Ballet, and in part due to the problems we raised earlier, I suspect it has not been read as closely as it deserves. But Denby makes your point rather explicitly in saying that the ballet company was family and personal history to Brodovitch, and that part of his own life was coming to an end. His relationship to the Ballets Russes began circa 1920 under Diaghilev and dates to his earliest years in exile in Paris. It’s significant that Brodovitch asked Denby to write the accompanying text. Not an art or photography critic, but someone who knew dance.

It wasn’t about photography, and Brodovitch wasn’t a photographer per se. It’s a book about dance. It’s probably even more accurate to say that the book is dance—an attempt to embody it. And Denby does something in writing that parallels what Brodovitch does in photography: he articulates the nuances of the body positions, philosophy, and dance language of the Ballets Russes for a time in the near future when it will no longer exist. It’s an approach that looks toward the everyday culture of this ballet tradition rather than any particular stars or iconic highlights. By the time Denby’s essay was published, the images were all that remained.

I want to return to the question of why Brodovitch would have opted for grained gravure, although it was technically unsuited for these production circumstances. Would he have known this? What was he after?

NH: What you’re asking is key. We have to consider the context—what would have been typical or possible, and then what he did. Almost certainly, the printers would have informed him that the grained plates would be a lot less consistent and that the same result could be obtained with a more dependable gridded etching process. A printer does not want to take on risks or unnecessary hassles—it’s about economics and reputation. We also know that Brodovitch had access to printers working both in the traditional gridded gravure method as well as with the new gravure etching techniques and then also high-quality halftone engraving. He didn’t choose any of these. It seems to me that the choice for grained gravure was intentional, that he sought out the graining process and even embraced all of the possible complications and risks.

But what was at the heart of this choice? We don’t have Brodovitch here to answer this. But let’s consider what the grained plates introduced into this work: There’s a wide variability in print quality across the edition so that, in the end, no two books are alike. Sometimes a particular image will be over-inked, sometimes not. The doctor blade on the press didn’t keep the non-printing areas consistently clean, so we see huge blotches of ink on the blank pages of some books, but not others. The doctor blade also caused vertical streaks through certain images, again inconsistently. And as we’ve discussed, a couple of the plates wore down in the highlight areas.

You brought up earlier the signs that the printing process was not under control. This is a good description. This is what I feel as a printer when I look at the original book. It shows me how it was made. It shows a human hand. It’s not anonymous. Even though I don’t know the printer personally, his individual human decisions during that print run are recorded on the pages. It evokes an empathic reaction in me.

JC: All of these factors combine to put Ballet in an unusual category, somewhere between fine art and industrial production.

NH: Exactly. The graining process was indeed strongly associated with fine-art production, more so than the gridded gravure process that was employed in the production of high-quality photography books on rotary presses. And in fashion and advertising, print production was predominantly halftone engraving. Brodovitch would have been keenly aware of this cultural hierarchy among printing techniques. But the impulse behind Ballet feels much more radical—it’s about harnessing an industrial machine as a direct means of making an artistic work. Naturally the mode of interaction changes completely in this context. The industrial status quo doesn’t matter. Standardization is irrelevant. It becomes an experiment, and the artist’s presence is not only welcome but critically important.

Evans’ approach to the print production of American Photographs also suggests an early example of an artist transforming an industrial method into a direct means of artistic production, as opposed to reproduction. His meticulousness is a stark contrast to Brodovitch’s strategy of risk and potential loss of control. But the expanse between the two different approaches indicates the broad potential for this way of working.

JC: You’ve looked into the technological developments in printing at this time, some of which were employed in a group of photobooks that Brodovitch collaborated with J. J. Augustin to develop. Can you give an overview of the industrial context that differed significantly from the path Brodovitch took?

NH: During this period—roughly 1936 into the mid-1940s—chemical etching is in its late phase. Around 1950, the industry turned to electromechanical engraving. I was interested to research the patents filed during this late phase of chemical etching, because they indicate the visual priorities and production challenges of that time. A major concern was making the etching process more dependable and repeatable—to reduce variability when plates were remade. Then durability and consistency: even gridded ink cells would wear down during long print runs, so techniques were developed to give the cell walls greater stability—particularly in the highlights, or shallowest areas of the plate—by varying not only the depth of the cells but also their size. The same techniques also addressed over-inked and blocked shadow areas with the goals of improving image quality and reducing ink use. This fits squarely within an industrial mindset that demands dependability, uniformity, greater output at less cost, and so forth. From an artistic perspective, it’s a trend away from a discernible human hand and presence in the print—a move away from an expressive point of view in the print in favor of a more standardized and repeatable precision.

JC: Do you feel that Brodovitch was consciously resisting these trends? He was certainly aware of the direction of print culture—it was all around him. He was participating in it, even shaping it, yet he chose something different for Ballet.

NH: It’s certainly a stark contrast, point-for-point, with the industrial priorities. He worked with the best large-scale industrial gravure and letterpress printers when it was appropriate. My impression is that he didn’t find that direction at all appropriate for Ballet. It’s a singular work with a singular purpose. He invented something personal. He improvised a printing technique that welcomed a human perspective, while the standard techniques of industry were aimed at nullifying that subjectivity.

JC: And that mirrors the way Brodovitch approached his subject. It was raw, intuitive, extemporaneous, alive.

NH: Exactly. Whatever his reason for using grained plates, the practical result is a process that shows page by page how the book was made. He cared more, I think, that the object and printing would be intense, human, and visibly marked by the challenge. I don’t think he cared one way or the other about the flaws; they weren’t intentional. But he did seem intent that his book would not be predictable, standardized, controlled, and anonymous. That is confirmed, in my view, by what he did not choose for the print production.

I’ve been able to reconstruct the smallest details of the production because the clues are right on the pages in plain view. For example, after disassembling the books, I could reassemble the imposition of the pages as they appeared on the original press sheets. There were three theoretical possibilities, but deviations in the printing showed decisively which one had been employed in the production of the book. The plates were clamped on the printing cylinder of the press at a slight angle—sometimes more, sometimes less. Most of the book was printed crooked, which explains the erratic folios at the corners and the exposed white edges on some pages of the original. These errors allowed me to confirm the imposition, but also the type and size of the press used for the edition. It was a small rotary gravure press—approximately 74 cm by 52 cm printing area. Serendipitously, this is exactly the same size as my own press on which I printed the reissue. And my press, like the original, is human-operated without computerized controls. As the printer, I cannot be anonymous. My decisions are visible, and I am personally responsible for what is on the pages of the reconstruction.

JC: Brodovitch’s penchant for spontaneous creation has been a guiding principle in our reconstruction of Ballet. The standard is essentially a moving target, unstable and inconsistent. So the book cannot and should not be cloned, but it can be reborn. This goes back to the idea of a performance. The original edition was made in a way that was subject to variability and spontaneity. Some might say that what was improvised can’t be repeated. But we’ve taken the position that Ballet welcomes being remade, performed again. It is sacrilege, as Michel Brodovitch has pointed out—he recalls that his uncle was uninterested in reissuing it during his lifetime—but the work is built on a principle of sacrilege.

NH: I agree, the work is unconcerned with the hallowed. There is great love, but not idealization. Brodovitch finds his own way in the moment. And when we remake the work, we aim to be in this as fully as Brodovitch was. Everything is on the line, as it should be. The work is about the committed human being in the moment of making. There may be some who don’t approve, but that’s always the case. It’s not a work that was made to please anyone. We have to align ourselves with what we understand to be Brodovitch’s intent.

JC: Given what we see today in the wider field of publishing, this is an unusual stand to take.

NH: It was also true in Brodovitch’s time. It points to why certain things happened in the original edition. There was no one to facilitate making the book in a way that would have strengthened the artistic position, no one who could have bridged the artist’s intentions and work process with the myriad technical aspects of bookmaking. That kind of work process had not yet been conceived in trade publishing. In 1945 there was a higher standard of craftsmanship and knowledge than we see across the publishing industry today, and it produced a much higher-quality book on average. But Ballet would have benefited from Brodovitch working with someone with craft training who could also collaborate directly in the artistic process.

JC: Not to standardize or take the life out of it, but to heighten or intensify the rendition in a way that would strengthen its fundamental character.

NH: The artistic vein of printing in New York would have been along the lines of Weyhe Gallery’s portfolio project, a very conservative approach and not even a distant match for Brodovitch’s insights and work process. Do you see any possibilities that might have existed in trade publishing?

JC: There would have been very few opportunities for a project like Ballet. Publishers with the means to produce high-quality visual books generally looked for projects or subjects with broader appeal. Merle Armitage might have been an option, but he was likely too much of an impresario to cede artistic control to Brodovitch. And the Museum of Modern Art’s photographic publications were generally linked to major exhibitions, such as the aforementioned American Photographs. Ballet was niche, both in subject and approach. Brodovitch went out on a limb with Ballet. Where does J. J. Augustin fit into the picture?

NH: The association with J. J. Augustin, both the publisher and the person, appears to have been a productive and genuinely collaborative relationship in which Brodovitch contributed novel visual strategies for attracting a broader range of readers to the core subject areas of the J. J. Augustin program, and Augustin took financial risks that seem to have paid off. Both Brodovitch and Augustin came out of the central and western European publishing milieu of the 1920s and 1930s, and Augustin, although much more conservative in his outlook, studied in Paris and London during the years Brodovitch lived and worked in Paris. This is to say that both men, despite divergent perspectives and interests, had an appreciation of the more inventive forms and visual strategies developing around the photobook in Europe. So the publisher’s insignia on the book is not entirely without meaning. But Augustin likely wasn’t the publisher as much as perhaps a sounding board and moral support for Brodovitch.

I’ve also thought about what unfolded after 1945 and whether any of the future publishers could have provided a more welcome home for Ballet. But historically, an ideal facilitator for Brodovitch’s artistic approach does not come along for another twenty-five years, when Gerhard Steidl, Joseph Beuys, and Klaus Staeck have the idea in the early 1970s that offset lithography can just as well be an artistic medium and a direct part of the artistic process. This is different than a publisher or art director with a sympathetic editorial instinct. Rather, it’s a publisher using the press personally as part of the artistic process—the artist/publisher directly in control of the printing press. That’s what would have made all the difference. Brodovitch saw the process of printing as part of the work.

JC: In many ways, Ballet was a book well ahead of its time. And this reissue presents a second chance for it to make its mark. What did you feel were the essential qualities to reinforce this time around?

NH: There was a dichotomy at play in making Ballet. Brodovitch’s process was fast. Instantaneous. To then put the content through the very slow process of bookmaking must have felt instinctively wrong to him. I see him allowing errors to enter the process—accepting them—as a way of making the bookmaking process seem more spontaneous. However, it’s not the mistakes but the work itself that embodies that spontaneity. The mistakes are experienced only as mistakes. We can draw an analogy to Brodovitch’s own subject, the Ballets Russes: there’s a slow, repetitive, deliberate process behind the spontaneous performances of the dancers. The slow process is invisible but indispensable. Brodovitch didn’t have anyone to perform his work in a way analogous to the dancers, that is, someone who could do all of the slow work and make it come out with the same life and intensity that had gone into it. The performer has technique and a command of the instrument to bring the most ineffable possibilities to life. And as Denby points out, the character and details that animate the Ballets Russes are right there in the images. My goal was to bring those to life in the prints, to make them palpable along with the very process of making.

JC: Virtually none of original negatives of the images in Ballet survive, probably also destroyed in the fire at Brodovitch’s home. Is gravure even a possibility under these circumstances as a printing method for a reissue? And what are the advantages of offset lithography?

NH: Rotogravure is still an option for production today, but this book would not be a candidate. One would need the original photographic sources. A gravure reproduction of a gravure source would not be satisfactory. Offset lithography is the obvious choice. Your mentor Richard Benson viewed offset lithography as the most versatile of the print media, capable of imitating all other print media. I agree, but I’m more interested in its originality as a medium, not so much its power of imitation. Offset lithography can do more than gravure. I have a greater range of tools at my disposal.

JC: Gravure and offset lithography have nothing in common when it comes to process. One has to jump through different hoops to reach the same outcome, or what looks and feels like a comparable outcome. On this point, I think there’s an overlap between what you see as the originality of the medium and what Benson saw as its capacity to imitate. On the most basic level, the gravure print is made with one black ink. The offset lithographs in the reissue are built up with five different inks, variations of greys and blacks, that are layered to evoke the visual texture and depth of the gravure print.

NH: To move a work from gravure into offset lithography requires a great degree of translation. Because of the way we perceive offset-lithographic inks—the different interplay of pigment, light, and paper—what matches a gravure print won’t necessarily have the same aesthetic or material impact. We can even compare the tonalities, the grain structure, the contrast, the tonal gradations and see that they are comparable to the original gravure print. But that is only information, a technical foundation. It’s analogous to literary translation. Imagine the difference between an objectively correct translation of the superficial meaning of a literary work as opposed to a translation that brings the work into a nuanced and multidimensional life in the new language. I look at how the print functions in the new medium. Does it draw a viewer to the correct details and provoke a pacing and pattern of visual interaction that will allow the character and complexity of the work to be seen? These are the foundational questions of an interpretation in print.

JC: All of this has to be worked out on press. You produced nine rounds of wet proofs. Each and every image was worked out on press before you printed the edition. What have you learned along the way and how has it shaped your printing?

NH: The gravure prints look different in every kind of light and from every angle. So do the offset prints. Under certain conditions they match exactly, then a change of the viewing conditions causes one to look more intense than the other. They respond to light in different ways. Natural filtered light is ideal for both. My point, though, is that the gravure print is not just one stable thing. How it looks fluctuates within a wide range. This is also true of the offset print.

Ballet is made up of many different kinds of images that require different approaches in printing. I use the same set of inks throughout the book, but they’re structured differently for each image. There are three levels on which the images operate: Each is a unique element. Each is connected within a phrase of elements, the individual ballets that form the sections of the book. Then the phrases are connected into a whole. My aim is to render the unique texture and character of each element while promoting a cohesive work.

The gravure prints are flat, but they function perfectly well. They don’t feel flat. The original production process didn’t lend itself to refinement, but the gravure medium is forgiving. Details and subtleties are present but not articulated clearly in the gravure prints. The gravure inks have a certain impact that compensates. In offset lithography, though, deep blacks won’t carry the print. What surrounds the black is more important. The images need a bit more dimensionality. The middle densities have to be more open, and the subtle transitions in the highlights and shadows more articulate.

JC: Brodovitch’s novel use of the two-page spread is often noted. How do you think it functions in Ballet as opposed to his layouts for Harper’s Bazaar or his design for Richard Avedon’s Observations?

The spread as a unit runs throughout Brodovitch’s work but it functions differently in Ballet. In his design work, it’s used to animate a visual dialogue, usually between two iconic images. The approach is fast-paced in comparison with Ballet and relies on a vertical format. This approach is at its height in Observations. In Ballet the double-page unit is strongly horizontal and continuous—a stage for action as opposed to images. Brodovitch marks this space as a visual performance that unfolds in time, and no particular image represents the action or the work as a whole. The editing is fascinating and unusually skillful. Brodovitch achieves visual impact with a series of images among which no single element can stand easily on its own. That’s the nature of movement. It’s not segmented but continuous, and the overall impression is collective rather than iconographic. Music is analogous—a single note or chord cannot stand for a work.

The two-page spread in Ballet also underscores the relationship of the book form—its symmetry, central spine, and range of movement—to the human body. Brodovitch connects his subject with his form. He develops this further in the French wrap, which is a garment for the book with its naked bookbinder’s boards. Costume and textile are so important to the articulation of movement in the images. The book has this parallel element. The French wrap, however, was never intended for a book with coverboards, and I think the technical obstacles impeded realization of Brodovitch’s intent.

He would have encountered the French wrap in Paris in the 1920s, where it was used as a provisional housing for still unbound books coming directly from the publisher or as a wrap for bound soft-cover books. It should be removable, and its attraction is the tactile pleasure of wrapping and unwrapping. Brodovitch likely glued the flaps together to hold them flat—a challenge posed by the thickness of the cover boards. Consequently, the wrap could not be removed. We decided to leave the flaps unglued to give the reader access to the full experience and the raw materials underneath.

JC: Coming back to the idea that Brodovitch’s emphasis was dance, not photography, how do you view the photographs in Ballet, having now worked with them so intimately?

NH: Brodovitch used an extraordinary range of mark-making techniques in this book that are analogous to painting or drawing. The photograph is not employed in its representational capacity so much as a means to mark the paper. And the printing method is not a means of reproduction as much as another layer of marking. He uses film, the gravure plate, ink, and the scraping action of the doctor blade as materials and tools, employing them in a way that feels direct, as if marked by the hand, despite the various indirect steps of production required to actually get the marks onto the paper. We see similar strategies of mark-making and layering in his early advertising designs of the 1920s.

Working with these images on a granular level, I was surprised to even find that among the many unplanned marks, blemishes, and scratches on the film and on the printing plates were deliberate marks scratched right into the copy prints. For example, in the portrait of Irina Baranova on page 16 the continuous line formed by the shoulder straps and binding on the bodice of her costume was lightened with very fine scratching. The shadow on her cheek was lightened with heavy hatching. On pages 23 and 25, the eyes in the shadow areas are scratched in by hand. On Sono Osato, it’s just a quick gesture that makes the white of her eyes slightly visible. On David Lichine, the eye is articulated in a way that draws that whole side of his face into a kind of painterly abstraction. The background is differentiated from his neck by scratching. Brodovitch was defining various planes, and they’re marked off by hand.

JC: Do you see Ballet as a photobook?

NH: I see it as an artist’s book made with light-sensitive film and ink. I also see the intense corporeal involvement of the artist. Not just the hand, but the whole body, which makes Ballet a work of dance or visual choreography. Denby appreciated Brodovitch’s deep insight into dance as well as his understanding of the salient features that defined the Ballets Russes as a dance culture. In the first paragraph of his essay, Denby maps out his evolving reaction to the work. Focusing first on the photographs as photographs, he describes them as having “the awkwardness, the catastrophic makeshift of sentimental souvenirs….” His focus then shifts from the photographic images as such toward the more elusive experience of dance: “As I look through Brodovitch’s book, I get more than from any action sequence I know, the sense of a whole ballet company dancing. As a record of that aspect of ballet I find it fascinating; and I admire in the photographer the special sensibility to dancing it gives proof of.” Denby’s attention shifts from the photograph to the photographer, who is a performer and animator of this visual choreography.

JC: Eight decades later, we find ourselves re-animating his choreography, aiming to do right by the spirit of his work. You’ve given a great deal of consideration to how to translate his images into offset lithography, taking into account dimensionality, gesture, layering, phrasing, pacing. Did you find that offset lithography offered opportunities to enhance certain aspects of the work that wouldn’t have been available with gravure?

NH: The offset prints have more volume, which brings the abstraction, texture, and intensity of the gravure medium and the diversity of the mark-making to life. This dimensionality also supports the editing decisions Brodovitch made. In the original, he didn’t have good control over the pacing—that is, the speed of the viewer’s response to an individual image or to a phrase of images. The first sections are all very short. “Concurrence” is only four pages. In “Les Cent Baisers,” the complexity and tempo of the movement comes to life only when the viewer stops. That’s the trick of volume. It slows the viewer down by directing the eye in and around the image, whereas the flatness of the gravure prints provokes a faster pace. The viewer is also moving with the book. In the gravure edition, the movement is centered in the hands, turning the pages. In the reissue, the movement is rather in the eyes and in the unfolding interaction with the marks on the page. Some of the images that on first glance appear to be less enticing are mind-boggling if you stop to look. They’re aesthetic, metaphysical, performative. The printing has to provoke the viewer to stop.

JC: I feel that one can only know this by taking the whole structure apart, down to its foundations, and then lovingly putting it back together, in many ways even better than new. I like reconstruction as a term for what we’ve done. It’s about taking the time to look carefully and glean understanding at each step along the way. It was very much an iterative experience.

NH: If we consider that the first spark that set Brodovitch on his path with the Ballets Russes was around 1920, Ballet evolved over twenty-five years. That’s a longstanding creative obsession—a slow process as well as a spontaneous one. At one point, I was curious to calculate roughly how many hours I’ve spent immersed in observing the work. It ranges from twenty to about 100 hours per image. There are 104 images in the book. I can’t stop looking and the hours continue to accumulate. The work astonishes me.

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Editors’ Note

Throughout this discussion, we refer to books created in collaboration between Brodovitch and the publisher J. J. Augustin. The exact details of the relationship cannot be confirmed. To gain a rough sense of the nature of this collaboration, however, we have examined a wide range of publications as well as the few historical accounts of the Augustin publishing family. The latter include the documentary film Zwiebelfische (2010) directed by Christian Bau and Artur Dieckhoff, with accompanying publication of the same name (2011), as well as A Not-So-Still Life (1984), the memoir of artist Jimmy Ernst, son of Max and Louise Ernst. The memoir provides a vivid account of Ernst’s typographic training at the production headquarters in Glückstadt as well as his escape from Nazi -Germany with the help of J. J. Augustin in New York.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, J. J. Augustin specialized in world languages and cultures, publishing the works of anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, and historians of art and architecture for academic and governmental institutions around the world. Many of its publications were doctoral dissertations. The New York operation was set up to facilitate work with American universities and field researchers.

Although Brodovitch was credited only for his dust jacket design for André Kertész’s Day of Paris (1945), the lack of further mention should be viewed in historical context. It was not common to identify the designer of a book, and J. J. Augustin did not do so in any other publications. The jacket design credit was an exception. In our view, Brodovitch’s design and editorial input is apparent in a number of additional titles published between 1943 and 1946. These include three books by George Hoyningen-Huene—Hellas (1943); Baalbek Palmyra (1946); and Mexican Heritage (1946)—and Horst P. Horst’s Photographs of a Decade (1944) and Patterns from Nature (1946) as well as Orientals (1945), a book of Ernest Rathenau’s photographs edited by Horst.

Although Photographs of a Decade presents some exceptions, the design of these publications is consistent with Brodovitch’s hallmark visual and typographic strategies, which are easily distinguishable from the otherwise consistent, academic house-style of the publisher. Moreover, the design approach is so consistent as to constitute a series style. While often related to the broader theme of world cultures that dominated the publisher’s program, the books mentioned were directed toward a general rather than academic readership. Photography was center stage—the main attraction. The editing developed a dynamic visual interplay between images using the two-page spread as a design unit. The typeface was Linotype Bodoni, which was not otherwise employed by the publisher for body text. The gravure production supported the photographic focus. J. J. Augustin proved a capable publisher of these titles, but would have relied on Brodovitch for his editorial and design insight as well as his connections to photographic talent, all of which appear to have been outside both the specialization and sphere of engagement of the publisher.

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This booklet accompanies the 2024 reissue of Ballet by Alexey Brodovitch with text by Edwin Denby.

Edited by Nina Holland and Joshua Chuang
© 2024 Little Steidl for the edition and the booklet text
All rights reserved.