Visual Studies Workshop Press ~ New York

Pleasure Beach
a book in three parts
By Syl Labrot
New York City: [Eclipse], 1976. First edition of 1200.

10.5 x 15.75"; 84 pages. Text in Monotype Bembo, Garamond, Linotype Weiss, Italic, and Arrighi (often photographically manipulated). Offset printed. Quarter cloth bound. Smyth sewn with flat black headband, square back binding, and illustrated dust jacket. With color photo-montage artwork throughout.

A three-part personal meditation on the nature of color photography.

VSW: "Pleasure Beach represents breakthroughs both in conception and production. Its design is symphonic, incorporating numerous themes and movements of color, layered images, and texts. It was printed under Labrot's careful super-vision from fine-line negatives made using techniques which he developed specifically for the offset production of this book."

Light Work Collection: "Syl Labrot's recent photographically-derived offset work is a significant departure from the traditional single image. Pleasure Beach, a lavish extension of the photographic book, is a remarkably dramatic exploration into his own history and imagination. Its foundations [are] Labrot's long-standing concern with the color photographic print as a space quite separate from both the reality reproduced by the camera and the graphic forces of the print, the print transcends its parts, yet is deeply linked to them. Working with offset allowed him to reconstruct and redefine his own evidence, much as if he were his own archaeologist.

"Syl Labrot was born in New Orleans in 1929 and died in 1977. He worked in many aspects of photography and printmaking including a collaboration with Walter Chappell and Nathan Lyons, that produced the book Under the Sun in 1960. His photographs, prints and paintings were widely exhibited and collected during his lifetime."
$200

Works with other artists
A is for Applebiting Alligators by Bea Nettles
Dream Pages by Bea Nettles
Drone / 1, 2, 3 by Francois Deschamps
Fake Snow Collection by Heidi Neilson
Homo Futura by Barbara Rosenthal
It Wasn't Little Rock by Clarissa Sligh
Reading Dick and Jane with Me by Clarissa Sligh

Visual Studies Workshop Press Out of Print Titles:
• The Practical Speller by Deborah Muirhead
• My Nine Migraine Cures by Ann Kalmbach and Tatana Kellner