Published by RM. Text by Alfonso Morales, Tomás Casademunt.
From the photographer of Death on the Altar and Mitla comes this record of Tomás Casademunt's journey along the Ruta Puuc on the Yucatán peninsula. Casademunt presents here 28 black-and-white photographs of the great Mayan palaces by moonlight: Oxkintok, Uxmal, Kabah, Sayil, Koom, Chichen Itzá, Xkich-Moo, and Xlapak. These photographs alternate with Casademunt's travel diary.
Published by Editorial RM. Text by Mercurio López Casillas.
There is the Day of the Dead that tourists see, and there is the Day of the Dead that is a lived ritual and a fact of life in Mexico--and it is the latter that the Spanish photojournalist Tomás Casademunt sets out to document in Death on the Altar. Casademunt's approach to this often misunderstood subject focuses on the altars that families assemble to remember and mourn the dead (rather than addressing any activity that attends them), and consequently his images are as humble and generous as the gestures they depict. Many of the shots of these domestic altars are frontal views, for Casademunt never attempts the spectacular shot, nor does he labor to insert himself into the tale. Like an ethnologist, he records a testimony without adding pictorial layers of sentiment or undue piety, so that what we get are intimate, ordinary atmospheres in which the sense of lived ritual is palpable and approachable and into which the viewer's intrusion is minimal. After seven years of explorations in villages in the states of Morelos, Michoacán, Oaxaca, Yucatán, Tlaxcala, Puebla and Guerrero, Tomás Casademunt has produced a group of photographs of great beauty and scale.
This book of photographs, the first to appear in English by Tomás Casademunt--author of Son de Cuba and Fábrica de Santos--looks at the famous Zapotec ruins near the Mexican city of Oaxaca. After a period of patient field work, Casademunt chose 13 nocturnal views without concession to the idyllic or the picturesque--and produced 13 impeccably framed images that depict an archetypal landscape whose emblematic nature was transfigured by a vision that sought to penetrate their timeless mysteries in stone and sign. The edition is limited to 1000 copies, 100 of which include an original print signed by the photographer. Both are prefaced by a series of fragments by nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeologists and travelers. Meticulously printed and produced, this volume will appeal to connoisseurs of architecture, anthropology and photography alike.
Tomás Casademunt: Death on the Altar