Firenze: Edizioni della Meridiana, 2007.

First printing. 71 pp., 9 x 9 inches. Sewn signatures glued into printed card covers. Illustrated with black-and-white photographs throughout. Text in Italian. As new. Item #4598

An exploration of childhood, and the transformation of memory into art. Thirty-eight photographs from filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s childhood, focusing on his family and their modest home, are interwoven with twenty-one photographs from the filming of The Mirror, whose characters and locations recreate or reinvent that childhood world. In some cases, we see scenes from the film juxtaposed with earlier images on which they were clearly modeled; the varying responses evoked by the two kinds of images open up an ambiguous emotional space, which is perhaps the space that autobiographical art inhabits.

The photographs are prefaced with two short essays by Andrei (written in 1962), and accompanied by excerpts from his father Arseny’s poems (translated into Italian by Andrei and others).

A deeply moving and simultaneously beguiling portrait.

Price: $75.00