Friendship, Vitality and Strength by photographer and installation artist Lonnie Graham is a series of three books housed in a custom wenge wood box (9.5” x 12” x 3.5”), which was supported by a National Endowment of the Arts artist residency award. The book documents Graham’s pilgrimages to Kenya and other parts of East Africa. Graham had just lost much of his work to a fire in Pittsburgh when he was invited to the Pyramid Atlantic residency. At the time, Graham was very keen to embark on a project that would “… record the portraits of African people we come upon (as) an enigma … what they transmit to us, beyond the warmth of personality and the privations of their existence is a sense of values.” The book was part of an installation entitled Lessons at My Father's Table .

Graham was reunited with fellow classmate from the San Francisco Art Institute, Larry Hamlin, then master printer at Crown Point Press, to edition the beautiful photogravure plates for the book. They were prepared by another mutual colleague and master printer, Lothar Osterburg, in New York. The artist books’ concertina bindings are covered with watermarked linen paper fiber, produced by Helen Frederick, and expressing the words in the book’s title.

Editions of the book are held in the collections at Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY and Stanford University Rare Book Collection, Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.

Printer: Larry Hamlin
Photogravure Plates: Lothar Osterburg

Learn more about the artist:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Graham