Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires

First edition, first printing. Hardcover. Black cloth-covered boards with title stamped in white on cover and spine; with photographically illustrated dust jacket. Photographs by Alicia D'Amico and Sara Facio. Text (in Spanish, French and English) by Julio Cortázar. Designed by Oscar C. Mara. Includes a 28-page laid-in booklet with the French and English text translations and a list of plates. 224 pp., with 178 black-and-white plates finely printed (many full-bleed) in Switzerland by Héliographia S.A., Lausanne. 10-7/8 x 9-3/8 inches. [Cited in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Volume II. (London and New York: Phaidon, 2006).] "Facio and D'Amico, who worked both collaboratively and independently, produced one of Latin America's early social documentaries in the book Humanario, an exposé of conditions in a state-run insane asylum. In a country which still identifies its culture as European, these women have played an important role in the development of contemporary Argentine photography and its promotion as a legitimate part of the art world." -Wendy Watriss, in Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America 1866-1994. From Martin Parr and Gerry Badger: " D'Amico and Facio...emphasize the city's hustle and bustle, but it is couched in strident, jazzy, edgy terms. Energy rather than elegance is the keyword...they employ a mode of expression that looks more to the internal and the psychological, expressed by means of a rough, grainy, graphic expressionism."