In 1969, with a Guggenheim Fellowship behind the decision, Garry Winogrand set out to photograph public life in the United States. The work continued for years, and Public Relations, published by The Museum of Modern Art in 1977, is its distillation: crowds, press conferences, demonstrations, and the ceremonial occasions on which Americans present themselves to one another. Winogrand worked where the street meets the institution — the museum gathering as much as the picket line — and the book keeps both in the same unsettled frame.

Tod Papageorge contributes the introduction. The volume runs 110 pages and appears here in its first edition as a trade paperback, the form in which many readers first met the sequence. It was made to accompany a 1977 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, which places the book inside a particular institutional moment: a museum turning its attention toward the street, and toward the unruly public it had long observed from a distance.

The photographs concern publicity as an apparatus rather than a finished image — the staging, the waiting, the attention of a crowd and its dispersal. Since publication the work has remained a reference point in discussions of the uneasy meeting of street photography and protest.

For a collector, the argument for this copy rests on the conjunction it records rather than on scarcity. It is the original 1977 MoMA edition, in paperback, with Papageorge’s essay acting as a counterweight to the pictures rather than as a caption to them: text and sequence together make the book a considered statement about American public life in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also a document of a museum’s own shift outward, and it rewards reading as an object with a structure, not merely as a gathering of photographs.