Haunted Houses by Corinne May Botz

2010-09-28T00:30:00-05:00

Haunted Houses
Written by Corinne May Botz

Hardcover, 208 pages | The Monacelli Press | Photography - Individual Photographers - Essays; Body, Mind & Spirit - Unexplained Phenomena; Art - Popular Culture | $40.00 | 978-1-58093-291-2 (1-58093-291-6)

“When I was between the ages of five and eight, my sister and I slept in a large attic bedroom. At nightfall the room was filled with gypsies who glided around in clusters. They wore colorful thin flowing dresses and rummaged greedily through my drawers and books as if they would steal everything. I lay in bed as stiff as a board, trying to will myself invisible, praying they would not notice me looking . . . Daylight obliterated the gypsies, rendering them as thoroughly insubstantial as they had been real in the dark. I had a vague understanding that my vision was private, so I never told my family what I saw.”

So began Corinne May Botz’s fascination with the invisible, a phenomenon that has profoundly influenced her approach to photography in style and subject matter. For more than ten years, she searched for ghost stories in buildings across the United States. She ventured into these haunted places with both camera and tape recorder in hand; her photographs, accompanied by first-person narratives, reveal a rare glimpse into American interiors, both physical and psychological.

This book includes more than eighty haunted buildings, from the legendary to the ordinary, including Edgar Allan Poe’s house in Baltimore, a New Jersey tavern, and a Massachusetts farmhouse, a log cabin in Kentucky, and a number of private residences. The text includes ghost stories told to the author by those who lived through the moving rugs, creaking floors, apparitions, disappearing—and reappearing—objects, cries in the night, mysteriously burning candles, and other unexplained occurrences.

Body Land by Arno Rafael Minkkinen

1999-08-17T00:30:00-05:00

Body Land
Photographed by Arno Rafael Minkkinen

Hardcover, 60 pages | Smithsonian Books | Photography - Subjects & Themes - Nudes; Photography - Individual Photographers - Essays | $25.95 | 978-1-56098-880-9 (1-56098-880-0)

In this collection of self-portraits Arno Rafael Minkkinen incorporates his own nude body into a range of isolated settings, emphasizing its bond to the natural world. Whether rooted to the ground like an aspen or emerging from a smooth bank of snow, he contorts himself to merge with the contours of the landscape. An essay that explores his relationship to the camera as both photographer and subject discusses how photography can merge past and future, as well as individual bodies with the earth, sea, and even air.

Random House New Releases - Photography - Individual Photographers - Essays

Haunted Houses by Corinne May Botz

Haunted Houses Written by Corinne May Botz

Body Land by Arno Rafael Minkkinen

Body Land Photographed by Arno Rafael Minkkinen

Haunted Houses
Written by Corinne May Botz

Body Land
Photographed by Arno Rafael Minkkinen