This book of black-and-white photographs, supplemented by a light text, is an exquisitely printed compilation of Carter's fifteen-year project of portraying the nude, not as a sex object, but as a spiritual document.

Capping the author's 35-year career as a photographer-writer, this work is both a culmination and a startlingly fresh departure. Carter's earlier books won awards on such diverse topics as the jazz musicians of New Orleans and the ghost towns of the American West. ILLUMINATIONS, printed on sumptuous paper by state-of-the-art presses in Florence, Italy, is at once a highly fresh, personal view of the human body, and an affirmation of many civilizations' deeply held values of form and beauty.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword by Weston Naef, J. Paul Getty Museum of Art

Part One: Light and Sight
Part Two: Framing Infinity
Part Three: What Moved; What Was Still
Part Four: Nudity and Knowing
Part Five: Where the Poetry Comes From
Part Six: My Concerns
Part Seven: In Praise of Polarity
Part Eight: From My Notebooks

"ILLUMINATIONS affirms that photography's grand tradition of rigor of form and tenderness of eye is alive and well... Carter's freshly seen images and commentaries are a personal hymn to the beauty of the nude."