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About Italy: In The Shadow Of Time
Product Description This beautifully printed collection captures the timeless spirit of Italy with haunting images of its architecture, antique objects, and evocative landscapes. Linda Butler strayed from the standard tourist path to create these subtly toned black-and-white photographs, each one a quiet meditation on Italy's past. The richly textured images are reproduced in the large-format tradition, preserving their delicate gradations in tone. This cloth-bound volume includes a text by the photographer that describes her immersion in Italy's mesmerizing history. Amazon.com Review Any scene shot in black and white contains a certain element of mystery and, often, nostalgia. But black and white hardly begins to describe the evocative tones of Linda Butler's work, which ranges from silvery blue to pale gold to rich velvet black. Whether a far-reaching photo of a landscape or an intimate portrait of a crypt, Butler's works are of mesmerizing composition; here a curtain moves in a gentle gust, there a cross of sunlight burns through a cathedral door, and everywhere the "presence of the past vibrates in the air." This series of landscapes and still lifes comprises an ode to Italy's ancestors. Light, shadow, and antiquity become the main characters: "No people appear in Butler's photographs, but their actuality as ghost presences who once built and tended the derelict palazzos ... can be felt on every page." Over the course of several years, Butler visited many of the regions of Italy--Umbria, Sicily, the Veneto, and Liguria to name a few--to amass this breathtaking collection, which will awe and delight photography fans and Italy aficionados alike. --Jhana Bach From Library Journal This is one of those exceptional books that will be deeply appreciated now and admired long into the future. As in her previous books (e.g., Rural Japan: Radiance of the Ordinary, LJ 5/1/92), Butler relies on a large-format camera to capture still lifes, architectural details, statues, and fountains. Going far beyond classic landscapes and nature photography, she displays a technical precision that recalls Ansel Adams at his finest. Her strikingly original images of wine bottles, olive trees, and villas reflect a depth of understanding, a rare tenderness toward common objects, and a sense for interiors. Not a single human being appears here, yet the kitchens, boathouses, and chapels are clearly inhabited by both people and ancient spirits. There is a haunting presence in the photographs, a delicate interplay of light and shadow, enhanced by subtle toning that creates a bluish cast in the darkest corners and shimmering, peach-colored tints in the bright sunlight seeping through door cracks and streaming through windows. Butler has also contributed a wonderful personal essay. A work for the ages; highly recommended.?Raymond Bial, Parkland Coll. Lib., Champaign, IL Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Although Butler's photographs are products of travels to places new to her, they are, like Roloff Beny's and Paul Strand's pictures of places foreign to them, different from even the most accomplished conventional travel photography. Butler scouts locations meticulously, places her tripod-mounted camera precisely, and, finally, very subtly tones her monochrome prints--in this case, to impart a slightly gilded glow to some whites, which then suggests an etiolated powder blue in some grays (astonishing examples of these effects are the images obtained in the volcanically preserved Roman cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii). Besides this painstaking craftsmanship, Butler imposes a perceptual theme on her overall presentation; in these photographs, that theme is the persistence of the past, so she excludes machines and people from them. Italy as she shows it is as timeless as the deserted Parisian streets of Eugene Atget's photographs (see Atget Paris, 1993) and as hauntingly beautiful. Ray Olson Review Her accounts o
