The Silence Of The Gaze by Luis Gonzàlez Palma

(1998)

First edition. First printing.

Medium format hard back in near new condition. Very minor shelf wear to the edges of dust jacket. Pages clean, binding firm.

Signed by Luis Gonzàlez Palma to inside cover page. 

About

English language edition of Luis Gonzàlez Palma's limited edition run of The Silence Of The Gaze from Italian publisher Peliti Associati, and with an essay by Laura Leonelli. The publication is Gonzàlez Palma's second collection of work. The Latin-American artist/photographer gained enormous and well-deserved international recognition for his portraits that are rich with the symbolism of indigenous myth and culture, Catholicism and humanity. The figures that inhabit Gonzalez Palma's mythic world (angels, devils, hybrid creatures, and enigmatic characters) transcend time and place, suggesting that mysticism and beauty are his ultimate subject matter. 

"Luis Gonzalez Palma is best-known for his strange, quiet portraits of the Mayan and Mestizo women in his native Guatemala. There is a contradictory quality to many of these portraits. The subjects are women who belong to cultures that have been marginalized yet the photographs have a distinctly European, even Victorian, appearance. Even when dressed in their native clothing, the subjects are often posed in a way that negates their native-ness. Despite that, the faces of the subjects often seem to be challenging the viewer, as if they're proclaiming their refusal to disappear totally. His body of work has been described as existing on both 'the bright and dark sides of Reason'. I'm not at all sure what that means, but it seems somehow appropriate. It's clear Gonzalez Palma's photography extends into the realm of metaphor. There is more to his photographs than what appears in his photographs" (Greg Fallis).