Mortensen, William. The Photographic Magic of William Mortensen by Deborah Irmas.

Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, 1979. Stapled wraps, exhibition catalog (dates not stated), 12 pages (including covers) with excellent illustrations and exhibition checklist. Illustrated with 9 photos including two full page in color and self-portrait. Contains a checklist of 72 works in the exhibition, chronology, and bibliography. Fine, very fresh, slight waviness along bottom edge of front cover. Kept in plastic sleeve.

Note: On January 27, 1897, William Mortensen was born in Park City, Utah, the son of Danish immigrants.  A few years after service in WWI, Mortensen began taking photos of Hollywood actors.  He loved horror movies and began creating fictional, highly manipulated photos of witches and demons, as well as nudes and historical personalities, like Machiavelli.  His Late Pictorialist work was antithetical to the purists like Ansel Adams, who called him the “Devil” and the “Anti-Christ.”  Mortensen published nine instructional books, of which his best known was Monsters & Madonnas: A Book of Methods (1st edition, 1934).  An obscure figure by his death in 1955, interest in him revived in the 1970s, when art school-trained artists began producing Neo-Pictorialist photographs. Beaumont Newhall added a disparaging remark about Mortensen, calling his work “highly sentimental,” in the revised 1982 edition of his textbook, The History of Photography.