Self Portrait with Cows Going Home

Photographer Plachy proves you can go home again and again in this stunning photographic voyage to her native Hungary. Plachy weaves together contemporary and vintage photographs, mementos and pictures of movie sets (including several from her son Adrien Brody's Oscar-winning turn in Roman Polanski's The Pianist). Together, these pieces come together like a puzzle, recreating an Eastern Europe that has weathered dictatorships, two world wars and is now opening up, confusedly, to democracy. The images of stray shadows, apartment buildings studded with bullet holes, and eerie reflections are as evocative as they are subtle. They remind us that great photographs don't have to rely on shock value to move or disturb. Plachy accents her work with memorable vignettes of her childhood in Communist Hungary as well as of her repeated journeys back east as an adult and an American citizen. One of the most touching of these small stories involves the photographer's grief-stricken mother, inconsolable after the deaths of her parents in Auschwitz. One day, while her mother stared at a framed photo of her deceased parents, she saw a gold moth land on the glass.""From then on golden butterflies and moths were sacred,"" writes Plachy. As the book goes on, relative after relative surrounds herself with images to bring back lost loved ones. By the book's end, we see Plachy herself doing the same thing and realize that through this book she has invited us on a private tour of a lost world, a journey that's as poignant as it is unforgettable. 22 four-color and 98 duotone images.