Photographs by Laura Volkerding.

Laura Volkerding crisscrossed France from 1985-95 to photograph the wood, stone, and metal artifacts of a tradition that, legend has it, dates back to the construction of Solomon's Temple. In the luminous duotone images reproduced in this book, Volkerding explores the work-shops, tools and projects of an elite group of artisan-crafts-men, most of them members of the Compagnons du Devoir. Volkerding's meticulously composed images are meditations on the atmosphere of the workshops, concentrating on the arrangement of tools within them on fragments of works in progress, and on aging reference drawings pinned to their walls. These photographs evoke a timeless serenity, yet they contain an undercurrent of surrealism arising from the artist's distinctive vision and the modern world's impact on the arcane secrets of an ancient tradition.

Hard Cover

(132 pp, 11.25 x 12.25 inches, ISBN 0-938262-30-0)

1 of 2 available



The Center for Creative Photography is an archive and research center located on the University of Arizona campus. We retain the archives of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Garry Winogrand, Harry Callahan, and other great 20th century photographers—over fifty archives in all.

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