HELLEBRAND, Nancy. Londoners.

[London]: Lund Humphries, 1974. First edition. Hardcover. 26 by 23 cm. [8]pp. plus 48 black-and-white photographic plates. Introduction by Simon Wilson. A forgotten and consequently under-appreciated body of work: an intimate documentary portrait sequence of ordinary Londoners photographed within their own homes, published to accompany Hellebrand’s solo exhibition Londoners at Home at the National Portrait Gallery, London, a landmark show in its own right, being the Gallery’s first ever solo exhibition given to a living woman, and its first given to an American artist. American-born (Philadelphia, 1944) and trained first in English literature at Columbia before turning to photography under Alexey Brodovitch — Richard Avedon’s own mentor — Hellebrand later settled in London, where her approach was further shaped under the influence of Bill Brandt. Londoners is the outsider’s eye turned inward: working-class and North London sitters posed amid the clutter and accumulation of their domestic interiors, each object as legible as the face beside it. The plates are individually titled with the same unadorned directness as the images themselves — Rock Fan, Man with Three Weeks to Live, Marion in a Bed-Sitter, Bernice Alone — vignettes that read as much as social documentary as portraiture. A quietly devastating and largely overlooked entry in the 1970s British documentary tradition. A very good copy in boards.