BOOKS  
 

 

 

 

cover of O Public Road!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O Public Road! Photographs of America by Peter Kayafas. Essay by Allan Gurganus. Song by Eef Barzelay. New York: Purple Martin Press, 2009. 8.5 x 10 inches, cloth. 160 pages, 65 duotones. ISBN 978-0-9797768-1-6. Limited Edition.
$55.00

“Peter Kayafas has spent twenty years out there breaking the speed limit of the intelligible. He has photographed eateries and ruins and horizons, the starts of parades, the aftermaths of tornados, human faces, human backs. In terms both of mileage and vision, he has earned his Union Card for Loners. Other traveling sages enjoy cranky membership; Robert Frank and Walker Evans come to mind. But travel, openness, talent carried to the force of love, these have helped make Kayafas The Road’s favored recent disciple, co-dependent.

Somehow the road yields up to him its collective privacies. Billboards promise one thing---surrounding desert begs to differ. Out there, in Kayafas’ lexicon and lens, an elk can seem a unicorn. That con man might prove the Messiah caught hitchhiking. Atop each homemade grave-marker, a bead of our recombinant national DNA awaits. Kayafas is especially attuned to how man-made objects interpret the very landscape that inspired then ruined them.”

-Allan Gurganus

From the essay “The Faraway Nearby: Peter Kayafas and the Road”

View photographs from the book on Peter Kayafas’s web site
www.peterkayafas.com/o_public_road


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cover of The Merry Cemetery of Sapanta

 

 

The Merry Cemetery of Sapanta, Photographs by Peter Kayafas, Epitaph translations by Adrian G. Sahlean and essay by Sanda Golopentia. New York : Purple Martin Press, 2007. 9.5 x 6.5 inches, paper. 120 pages; 47 plates; ISBN 978-0-9797768-0-9. Limited Edition.
$45.00

Designed by the celebrated Dutch designer Tessa van der Waals and exquisitely produced in Holland , the first publication of the Purple Martin Press, The Merry Cemetery of Sapanta, brings an extraordinary Romanian treasure to an international audience. This bilingual edition of photographs of the carved graves elegantly presents this unusual and remote place in all its primitive splendor and preserves the humor, tragedy and humanity of the memorials and their respective epitaphs.

View photographs from the book on Peter Kayafas’s web site
www.peterkayafas.com/sapanta


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