Samaras Album by Lucas Samaras, First Edition

Samaras Album: Autointerview, Autobiography, Autopolaroid by Lucas Samaras

First Edition, First Printing, 1971, Limited to 2000 copies

This is first edition, first printing of Lucas Samaras’s most famous photobook “Samaras Album” published by Whitney Museum of American Art and Pace Editions, New York in 1971 with a limitation of 2000 copies that was released in anticipation of the Whitney's 1972 Samaras retrospective. Vince Aletti in “The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century” writes,” Album gathers the artist's first body of photographic work…Working alone, often late at night and almost always in the nude, Samaras turned his cluttered apartment into an impromptu Theater of the Ridiculous with himself as both willing cast and inspired crew...[in this book] Images--usually antic, erotic variations on a theme--are reproduced in their original size in color and black-and-white, and arranged in grids, in rows, or singly on a page as if in a family snapshot album or a demented high school yearbook."

Featuring a self-interview, autobiography, and hundreds of Polaroid images, both black-and-white and in color, the book measures approximately 12” x 9” and is bound in embossed decorative boards with a photographic paste down. The book was issued without a dust jacket. The book is in Near Fine+ condition with some tendering to the first free endpaper.

Cited in “The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century” by Andrew Roth

Photographs of the book cover as well as photographs contained in the book appear below. Please note that although the photographs appear digitized as thumbnails, they are viewable in the photo viewer by running your mouse over the thumbnail. You can also click on the thumbnail to open a separate window where the picture is viewable.