From Booklist
Brazilian photographer Mario Cravo Neto draws both on his sculptural sense (he was trained as a sculptor) and the spirit of Afro-Brazilian culture to produce the sensual images presented in this book. Large, beautifully lighted, full-page close-ups, these pictures typically concentrate on heads or body fragments before each of which some common object--a stone, a bird, a dagger, an egg--is held up in a centered presentation, as though in a ritual offering. The darkness, the exquisitely described surfaces, and the sensuality of the rounded forms--both objects and body parts--educe a mystery at once bodily and metaphysical. Peter Weiermair gets it right when, in his introductory commentary, he names this mysterious effect the "beauty of archaic animality." Cravo Neto is a photographer to watch. Gretchen Garner
