After many years of photographing books, I have decided to explore in depth two possibilities: a few Ethiopian Bibles, and a sixteenth century medical book by Ambrose Pare. Although I know what the text in the Bibles is, these Bibles with their palimpsests of leather, wood, paint, threads, and gazelle skin pages make me want to explore them visually. I can read the English and some of the French edition of Pare, but Pare’s thinking is from another time, the edge of the enlightenment.

The Bible in ‘Book’ announces itself in several ways. It not only speaks as a sculptural object filled with words of a long human tradition; in damp weather it and its leather nomad’s bag still smell of countless campfires. Its pages have red and black writing in Geez, copied by two or more scribes. Someone has stitched the gazelle skin pages to close natural holes in the hide. This book was probably its owner’s only book, a prized possession. How differently we regard books in the age of Amazon.com.

Ambrose Pare, sixteenth century physician to kings of France wrote a book that was printed in several languages and many editions, a work that reveals the cusp of traditional verbal learning and enlightened observation. The woodcuts are of monsters, beasts, monstrous births, frightening surgical instruments and human anatomy. As the book proliferated into many editions, text was edited, translated, and cut and the woodcut blocks were recut until their prints became clumsy shells of the original. Many of the 17th century editions have prints from new blocks copied from earlier editions as well as some entirely new illustrations. Despite the monsters Pare sometimes makes brilliant observations. He was the first to describe the optic nerves that cross over to the opposite side of the brain. Unfortunately this idea and its wonderful illustration do not occur in the English 17th century edition that I have been working with. As soon as information is in a book it gains authority, but that does not guarantee that all is revealed to every reader or that any reader will understand exactly what the author intended, especially when he or she only sees a small part of the book, the part a photographer chooses. I am interested in books that have different lives in different times.

A closed book tempts me to open it. As it opens a book may release ideas the same way an opening door releases light into a darkened room. Alternatively violence and hatred may explode through a door leaving a dark burned interior. In a book one person’s violence may be another’s inspiration. Once created, books shining bright or turning dark can only live through those who look at them.

Olivia Parker©2006