“A PRECARIOUS BALANCE BETWEEN THE BEAUTY… AND THE HORROR”

MEISELAS, Susan. Nicaragua. New York: Pantheon, (1981). Oblong quarto, original black cloth, original dust jacket. $1100.

First American edition, with 71 dramatic color photographic plates by MacArthur Award-winner Susan Meiselas.

Five years after the appearance of Carnival Strippers (1976), the photobook that prompted her acceptance into Magnum, Susan Meiselas "published her groundbreaking book on the Nicaraguan revolution" (Roth, 238). It was immediately praised as a work whose perspective of war "becomes haunting precisely because of the precarious balance between the beauty of its pictures and the horror of what they depict," and was influential in winning Meiselas a 1992 MacArthur fellowship (New York Times). The first edition was published one year earlier in French; this edition was published in hardback the same year as the first British edition, priority unknown. With 71 color photographic plates, quotations, factual information, a map of Nicaragua, and a timeline.

Dust jacket with several tiny chips and a few small closed tears to top and bottom edges, text block expertly reinforced. A lovely copy.