Lisboa, Cidade Triste e Alegre

Costa Martins & Victor Palla
Lisboa, Cidade Triste e Alegre

Photographs: Victor Palla & Costa Martins

Publisher: Self published

Year: 1959

Price: 32000 €

Comments: Hardcover leather binding with embossed gold lettering with jacket housed in a rare slipcase with a small print tipped on. Green flyleaves, b&w photographs beautifully printed in rich gravure. Special edition of 60 copies, numbered, initialled and signed by the artists, This copy bears the number 7, belonging to Victor Palla's ex-wife, Mrs D. Maria Emília Rocha! A pure rarity !!

‘Lisboa, Cidade Triste e Alegre’, originally published in 1959, is a symphony about Lisbon of the fifties, showing the city in its different aspects. The “graphic poem”, as Victor Palla and Costa Martins liked to call it, constructs a new city with (photographic and poetic) images, a city in the process of assimilating an international style.

The photos are very modern, grainy, taken in a fast way, choosing spontaneity and instinct to artifact and composition. According to Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, who included this book in "The Photobook: A History, vol.1": 'Lisboa is particularly notable for using many of the book-making ideas developed by William Klein, and Dutch photographers like Ed van der Elsken and Joan van der Keuken, and has a vibrant, cinematic feeling'.