Facile

One of the great Surrealist photobooks, Facile brings together Éluard’s poetry, Man Ray’s photographs of Nusch Éluard, and the radical typography of Guy Lévis Mano. Parr and Badger famously described the book as a perfect ménage à trois of poetry, photography and typography. Its extraordinary integration of image and text made it a landmark of modernist book design.

The recipient, Evrard de Rouvre, was a publisher, collector and later film producer. He founded Éditions Vrille in 1944 and assembled an important library of modern literature, in which Éluard was particularly well represented. Éluard mistakenly gives his first name as “Edouard,” an error known in other presentation copies.

Copies of Facile on Japanese paper are exceptionally rare. As a hors-commerce copy, this example was not issued with the original solarized photograph reserved for the numbered deluxe copies.

References: Roth, The Book of 101 Books, pp. 86–87; Boulestreau, “Le Photopoème Facile”; Sinibaldi–Couturier, Regards sur un siècle de photographie à travers le livre, no. 48.