Richard Avedon and James Baldwin's American journey.
 
This pristine first Spanish edition of Richard Avedon and James Baldwin's Nothing Personal explores the complexities and contradictions of American society. Through images and text, Avedon and Baldwin examine the formation of identity and the networks of relationships that connect and separate people.
 
In 1963–1964, former school friends Richard Avedon, then one of the world's most famous photographers, and James Baldwin, a celebrated novelist and essayist and a leading literary voice in the American civil rights struggle, collaborated on Nothing Personal, a book about life in the United States.
 
Avedon's cast ranges from civil rights icons to intellectuals, politicians, pop singers, psychiatric hospital patients and ordinary Americans, all carefully sequenced, juxtaposed and cropped. The American Nazi Party faces poet Allen Ginsberg, and an exhausted General Eisenhower gives way to Malcolm X's vigour. Vulnerable psychiatric patients deprived of human warmth are followed by the embrace of a mother and child.
 
When published in 1964, Avedon and Baldwin's vision of America sparked fierce controversy. Both were harshly criticised as elitist liberals and "Hollywood moralists" who did not represent the feelings of real Americans. Sound familiar?