Picturing Bolivia
GERSTMANN, Roberto.
Bolivia 150 grabados en cobre. Introducción por Dr F. Ahlfeld. Paris, Braun & Co., 1928.
Folio, frontispiece portrait of Gerstmann, pp. [6], 150 photographic plates (signed, numbered, and captioned), 1 map of Bolivia, pp. 22, [1 (colophon)]; a few spots to margins and fore-edges, occasional light marks; very good in contemporary half vellum, marbled sides, ‘Bolivia’ in ink to spine, top edge gilt, marbled endpapers; somewhat worn and marked, some foxing to endpapers.
First edition with 150 striking Bolivian photographs by the Vienna-born photographer Roberto Gerstmann, who travelled extensively in South America, with a preface in Spanish, German, and English by Dr F. Ahlfeld.
Ahlfeld writes of Gerstmann in the preface as follows: ‘His teeth rattling with fever, he rode through the deserts of lonely Carangas; quite alone, accompanied only by his faithful camera, he stalked the wild Siriono Indians in the jungles of the Beni; and without any experience in mountain climbing, he undertook dangerous ascensions of hitherto unconquered peaks … he roamed forever through Bolivia from the volcanoes in the West to the Iténez River near the Brazilian border … Just as the country appears to the traveler – glaciers, jungles, an old Spanish church, the pampa, a typical indian, and again soaring mountains – thus, with all its sharp contrasts, it will present itself to the reader of this volume.’