It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate time for a rerelease of “Nothing Personal,” the collaborative book by Richard Avedon and James Baldwin, first published in 1964. Combining Avedon’s images of civil rights activists and white supremacists, politicians, artists and patients at a Louisiana mental hospital, and a 20,000-word essay by Baldwin, the book ruminated on American identity. The new Taschen edition is a reprint of the original, slip-cased with a 72-page booklet that includes an essay by critic Hilton Als. In it, Als covers the artists’ relationship and relates his own discovery of the book in the Brooklyn Public Library as a 13-year-old child who’d been branded a “sissy” by his peers. “It’s the first time I see and realize that current events can be art, that being humane is an art,” Als writes. The booklet includes historic photographs of Baldwin and his family, of Baldwin and Avedon, outtakes from the book, some of Avedon’s correspondence, and reproductions of one of Avedon’s original maquettes.
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