Iluminaciones

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.

** Nominated for a 2015 IPPY Award from the Independent Publishers Association **