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JAMES AGEE & WALKER EVANS. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Three Tenement Families. Text by James Agee. Illustrated with 31 reproductions of Evans' evocative photographs of the Great Depression. 8vo, silver-stamped black boards; photo-pictorial dust jacket, very fine condition; housed in a custom clamshell box of brown morroco and cloth, titled in gilt on the spine. Roth 108; Parr/Badger I 144; Auer 293. FIRST EDITION, SIGNED BY JAMES AGEE. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941
This copy is inscribed and presented by James Agee to his friend, photographer Florence Meyer Homolka on the front free endpaper, " Flo, with love - Jim, December 11, 1948."
Florence Meyer Homolka was born in New York City, January 22, 1911, the eldest daughter of Eugene Meyer, financier and publisher of the Washington Post, and Elizabeth (Ernst) Meyer. She studied dance and acting in Paris and Berlin, associating with artists; she once played her violin in the studio of Constantin Brancusi. In Berlin, she met and married the noted actor, Oskar Homolka. The couple left Berlin in 1939, spent a few years in London, were part of the New York acting and literary circle, and in 1943, settled in Pacific Palisades. During her Paris years she met Man Ray, and living close to him in the Los Angeles area, became his student of photography. "Man Ray is my revered teacher, and I am proud when he tells me that I am following in his footsteps as a photographer," she noted.
With her connection to Hollywood, she worked as a photographer on several film sets, and after her divorce in 1946, she returned to New York. She regularly sold her portraits for publication; among her sitters were: Judy Garland, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Horowitz, Arnold Schoenberg, Christopher Isherwood, Edward Steichen, Brassaï, Man Ray, and for Charlie Chaplin she made over 150 photographs on the set of Limelight. Among her friends were Walker Evans and James Agee; she made portraits of both. For Agee's posthumously published, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family, one of Homolka's portraits was used on the dust jacket. Florence Homolka died in Los Angeles, November 27, 1962.
