PHOTOGRAPHER SYLVIA PLACHY PRESENTS A PERSONAL HISTORY OF EASTERN EUROPEIN SELF PORTRAIT WITH COWS GOING HOME

"For forty years of travel back and forth, I have brought back these images and stories and offer them as a bouquet at the shrine of my childhood memory." Sylvia Plachy

In 1956, in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution, thirteen-year-old Sylvia Plachy fled her native Hungary with her parents, carrying nothing but a small suitcase and a teddy bear. She ultimately arrived in the U.S. in 1958 and became a U.S. citizen in 1963. Over the past forty years, Sylvia Plachy has returned to her homeland regularly to photograph Eastern Europe at various periods of transition and to search for her lost childhood. For the first time, this extraordinary body of work is being published as a collection in Self-Portrait with Cows Going Home (Aperture, September 27, 2004). An intensely personal photographic journey, the book serves as an extended self-portrait, a record of the Eastern Europe of Plachy' s childhood, and a celebration of many years of superb image making.

In Self-Portrait with Cows Going Home, Plachy explores her attachment to places and people and her complex relationship to the country that she was forced to leave as a child. Her journey home is a dense layering of stories and memories told in pictures that convey the elusiveness of homecoming. A gifted storyteller, Plachy's poetic and affecting images evoke a wide range of human emotions-from joyful to funny, from touching to sorrowful. The accompanying text includes childhood stories and impressions of places to which Plachy has traveled in her work as a photographer.

This volume, that Plachy calls "a farewell to my long attachment to my birthplace," includes pictures from family albums as well as scenes from the landscapes and villages of Hungary, Romania, Russia, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the former Yugoslavia. They are testimony to Plachy's endless curiosity and engagement with people and places. The picture of a circus bear standing upright and reaching forward with a look of profound sadness and intelligence on its face is as deeply felt as a portrait of Plachy's son, Adrien Brody, taken on the set of Roman Polanski's film The Pianist. In image after image Plachy captures the absurd and off-beat in human interactions, but she also conveys the complexity of the changes taking place in the places she has visited.

Sylvia Plachy's first book, Sylvia Plachy 's Unguided Tour (Aperture, 1990), won an International Center of Photography Infinity Award. Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry (1996) and Signs and Relics (2000) followed, both of which garnered Plachy much critical praise. Self-Portrait With Cows Going Home is an important addition to Sylvia Plachy's rich body of work.

Plachy has exhibited her work at several U.S. venues including the Whitney Museum, the Queens Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts. She has also had shows in Budapest, Ljubljana, Manchester, Berlin, Vancouver, Perpignan, Arles, and Pingyau, China. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Time, GEO, Granta, Artforum, Conde Nast Traveler, New York Times Magazine, among many other outlets. For over eight years, the Village Voice published a weekly uncaptioned, black and white photograph of Plachy's work under the heading "Sylvia Plachy's Unguided Tour."

22 four-color and 98 duotone images
11% x 9% inches, 208 pages, Hardcover ISBN: 1-931788-43-X
$50.00, £22.50; Publication date: September 27, 2004

Aperture - a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to advancing fine photography - was founded in 1952 by six gifted individuals: photographers Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, and Minor White; historian Beaumont Newhall; and writer/curator Nancy Newhall. With scant resources, these visionary artists created a new periodical, Aperture magazine, to serve photography enthusiasts worldwide. As the medium flourished, so too did the Aperture Foundation, expanding to include the subsequent publication of books; limited edition prints; and a traveling exhibitions program that has circulated over 100 exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad.

	Sylvia Plachy Self Portrait with Cows Going Home 2004, Aperture, 208 pages Hardcover, $50 Publication date: Sept 27, 2004 To pre-order, please contact the gallery
	Sylvia Plachy Signs & Relics Forward by Wim Wenders 1999, The Monacelli Press, 224 pages Hardcover
	Sylvia Plachy Sylvia Plachy's Unguided Tour Afterward by Guy Trebay Music by Tom Waits 1990, Aperture Foundation Inc. Hardcover $100 includes "flex disc" by Tom Waits Out of Print; limited number available More artists' books >