Blumberg, Donald. In Front of St. Patrick's Cathedral by Donald Blumberg, with Extra.

Flower Mountain Press, 1973, wraps, very good with minor edge wear. First edition.  Blumberg's innovative photographs taken in front of the Catholic cathedral on Fifth Avenue, New York City. Baseball card of the photographer Donald Blumberg by Mike Mandel laid in, number 72 in the series with portrait on recto and statement by Blumberg and biographical data on verso. The card is in near fine condition with very slight tanning at edges on verso. Introduction by Nathan Lyons. Preface by Minor White.  Book comes with custom-made 4-mil polyester jacket, not shown in illustrations.  Summary:

In Front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral is a photographic book by American artist Donald Blumberg that presents a series of black-and-white images taken from 1965–1967 showing people emerging from St. Patrick’s Cathedral onto Fifth Avenue in New York City. Rather than a text narrative, the book is a visual exploration in which Blumberg experiments with light, shadow, perspective, time, and motion, turning ordinary street scenes into striking formal compositions.

Blumberg deliberately underexposed the dark interior of the cathedral so that worshippers stepping into bright daylight appear dramatically silhouetted or sharply contrasted against deep black backgrounds. Some images use multiple exposures or panoramic merging of sequential negatives, which alters spatial relationships and creates unusual juxtapositions of figures and forms.

The result is not a documentary record in the conventional sense, but rather a conceptual and aesthetic statement about perception, human presence, and the photographic medium itself. Figures in the book sometimes feel ethereal, timeless, or even abstract, as Blumberg pushes photographic boundaries and invites the viewer to reconsider how everyday moments can be transformed into art.

The published volume includes an introduction by Nathan Lyons and a preface by Minor White, situating the work within 20th-century photographic practice and highlighting Blumberg’s innovative approach. 

Donald Blumberg (born April 4, 1935) is an American photographer, conceptual artist, and educator known for pushing the compositional and conceptual boundaries of photographic perception. Originally trained as a scientist with degrees in biology from Cornell University and the University of Colorado, he shifted to photography after moving to New York City in the early 1960s. Blumberg first gained widespread critical acclaim for his innovative street-based series, such as In Front of St. Patrick's Cathedral (1973), in which he experimented with multiple exposures and dark-ground figure isolation, as well as his early TV-screen photograph series documenting political broadcasts and war coverage. Over a career spanning more than four decades, he expanded his conceptual explorations through photo-collages, landscape studies, and television screen imagery incorporating closed-captioning to interrogate media, perception, and narrative.Alongside his artistic practice, Blumberg was a dedicated educator, teaching photography at the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1965 to 1981 and at the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles from 1981 to 1990.