The Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague is one of the oldest and most beautiful Jewish cemeteries in the world. This book of 90 color photographs illustrates the cemetery in both four seasons and a wide variety of lighting conditions. With permission obtained from the Jewish Museum in Prague, many of the images are off the major trails where tourists are not allowed to walk.The text discusses the religious, cultural and literary history of the cemetery and its relationship to Prague especially during the period of the Habsburg empire.Special attention is paid to the transition of the dead over the River of Fire as represented in the Jewish mystical text The Zohar.

Crossing the River of Fire: The Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague

Virgil Hancock III

At the beginning of the third millennium, Las Vegas, Nevada has become a new model of consumer entertainment--the total pleasure market in which everything is for sale. Hancock's superb photographic eye chronicles the pop-culture fantasy playground that is Las Vegas, a physical location as much as an idea, a place that deliberately blurs politics, money, art, religion, entertainment, sex, and anything else architects can imagine and marketeers can sell. The range of Hancock's images is as diverse as the city itself: the town's neon-saturated nights; the glitzy, monumental hotel-palaces; the decaying buildings yielding to wrecking crews; the billboards that sell everything and convey unexpected truths; and a sampling of all that draws a worldwide audience seeking to be entertained. 
Accompanying Hancock's startling images and perceptive introductory essay is Gregory McNamee's thoughtful reconsideration of Las Vegas. His essay relates in words what Hancock narrates visually, exposing in the process a city caught between opulence, glamour, fantasy and poverty, decay, and despair. Together text and image in this book convey the essence of Las Vegas--the magic of illusion. This book is ultimately about material and spiritual alchemy--the transformation of fantasies into reality and the purification of consumption. 
Las Vegas is a visceral city, an exaggerated feast for the eye, and at the same time it is a community fractured by consumerism--in which buying and selling set all our choices. No book to date offers the intense emotional experience of Las Vegas found in American Byzantium.

American Byzantium: Photographs of Las Vegas (University of Arizona Southwest Center series)

Arts & Photography

Gregory McNamee

Individual Artists

University of New Mexico Press

Bisbee The Alchemical City of the Borderlands

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Books by Virgil Hancock III