$45.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover with four-color jacket
148 pages with 91 color photographs by the author
11.75″ x 12.25″ (upright/portrait)
ISBN: 978–1–938086–27–4
Published in November 2014
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
No e-book has been authorized.
Events and Exhibitions
Thursday, February 12 at 7:00 pm
Brazos Books, Houston, Texas
Book Talk
by Jack Parsons
with an essay by Frederick Turner
Nominated for a 2015 IPPY Award from the Independent Publishers Association.
How does a photographer learn to see? How does he create his own visual language—as unique as a fingerprint and as inimitable as the voice of a great writer?
In Iluminaciones, Jack Parsons’s seventeenth book, he takes the viewer on a very personal, deeply intuitive journey that reveals how he has honed his photographic vision. The answer is subtle—and remarkable: It is by growing into his own photographs. Here he shares with us ninety-one of his favorite photographs taken over the long arc of his stellar career. These are images that, over time, taught him, as he says, “to see the everyday world with new and better eyes” and that encouraged him “to look deeply instead of glancing and forgetting.”
The photographs in Iluminaciones were taken all over the world, from the vast expanses of America’s desert Southwest to a mosque in Turkey and temples in Laos, Burma, and Japan, of colorful streets in Mexico and Italy to quiet swimming pools in Southern California, from monumental urban landscapes in Eastern Europe to clouds forming over Ireland and Maui. Most of the pictures are of simple, commonplace things and places that we might not give a second glance. Yet Parsons did and in so doing both reveals and celebrates the subtle power and quiet beauty of the everyday. Complemented by the artful commentary of Frederick Turner, Iluminaciones is a stunning visual exploration of the beauty that shines through our world when we take the time to stop and look.
About
About the Author
Jack Parsons an experienced cinematographer, is most famous for his elegant photography that captures the visual heritage of the American Southwest. He is the author of seventeen books of photography, including Santa Fe (Rizzoli, 1993), Santa Fe Houses (Potter Style, 2002), El Rancho de las Golondrinas: Living History in New Mexico’s La Cienega Valley (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2009), and Dark Beauty: Photographs of New Mexico (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2014). In recognition of his unique career and contributions to the state of New Mexico, he was honored in 2006 with the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence and Achievement in the Arts. He lives in Santa Fe. His website is www.jackparsonsdigital.com.
About the Essayist
Frederick Turner is the author of twelve books of fiction and non-fiction, including Of Chiles, Cacti, and Fighting Cocks: Notes on the American West (North Point Press, 1990), Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit against the Wilderness (Rutgers, 1992), 1929: A Novel of the Jazz Age (Counterpoint, 2004), and Henry Miller and the Making of ‘Tropic of Cancer’ (Yale, 2012). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, he lives in Santa Fe.
Slide Show
View from U Bein teakbridge, Amarapura, Myanmar (Burma), 2003. 
Cattle, Sittwe, Myanmar (Burma), 2003. 
Kuthodaw Pagoda, Mandalay, Myanmar (Burma), 2003. 
Mosque, Ahlit, Turkey, 2004. 
Shipyard, County Cork, Ireland, 2000. 
Doll covered with colored sand, Day of the Dead, Oaxaca, Mexico 1988. 
Three-legged dog, Nabaj, Guatemala, 1993. 
Bicycle, Lago di Garda, Italy, 1995. 
Shadow of a pillar and corbel, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1984. 
Arch of trees over the plaza of La Seu d’Urgell, Spain, 1996. 
Monarch butterflies, El Rosario, Mexico, 1997. 
Samode Palace, Samode, India, 2008. 
Moon, White Sands, New Mexico, 1975. 
Stairs, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, 1997. 
Gondola, Venice, Italy, 1995. 
Wet sand and surf, Redondo Beach, California, 1997.
Praise
“In the midst of dozens of photography and filmmaking projects, Jack Parsons has taken pictures of all kinds of things. Just recently, as he culled images from his collection of thousands of slides for a new book, Iluminaciones, his 17th…”
—Paul Weideman, Pasatiempo (click to read the full interview)
“What Jack Parsons has learned from a life of photographing the ordinary and extraordinary in our daily environment he now passes on to us in Iluminaciones. This is a quietly beautiful book full of revelations for those who share his faith that images can teach us the world.”
—Lucy R. Lippard, author of Undermining: A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics and Art in the Changing West
“Framed and recorded in time, in luminous depth beyond their surfaces, Parsons’s photographs reveal inscapes, with more to say than can be spoken.”
—Godfrey Reggio, Director of Koyaanisquatsi
My Place
I have traveled a lot in my life—to Europe, India, Southeast Asia—and have lived in many places—New York City, London, Colorado, Switzerland. But New Mexico is the first place I’ve ever called home. It is where my wife and I have raised our children and where, for more than forty years, I have done most of my work. And it was through my photography that I was able to learn about this part of the world and make it my home.
At the end of a summer day here in Santa Fe, what I love most is to sit on the patio of my house with a glass of good wine and watch the light change and the shadows lengthen along the Cerrillos Hills, the Ortiz Mountains, and, looming in the background, the Sandias. It is an expansive view unmarred by houses or roads and stretches west almost to Albuquerque. I can sit out here without the noise of cellphones or people or cars for an hour or two and watch the hummingbirds and the finches and jays move about in the soft, magical light and other than their sweet sound, enjoy the greatest luxury we can have in this turbulent world—silence. Nature’s silence and the view of a vast, natural plain studded with juniper and pinon and grass make this a perfect place, a home, a refuge, an oasis in a difficult world.
Copyright © 2014 Jack Parsons. All rights reserved.