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Photo Book Reviews

Self Portrait with Cows Going Home (Aperture) by Sylvia Plachy Reviewed by José M. Gonzalez Article rating: 6.12

Hungarian born photographer Sylvia Plachy goes home for the last time in a bitter sweet final parting with her home land. Self Portrait with Cows Going Home, Plachy’s latest book, is a powerful personal memoir told through images and anecdotes about her beginnings in communist Hungary, to her migration to Austria, then New York with her parents and her repeated journeys back to Hungary.

Self Portrait with Cows Going Home has 22 four-color and 98 duotone images. Plachy compiles and quilts contemporary, older, and other photographs not taken by her to assemble a life of heartache, love, loss, happiness, but most of all searching. It is this search for a home that Plachy focuses on and with which she leads the reader through this book through so many places and times, a metaphor for her life.

Plachy doesn’t relate her story chronologically, with the pictures or stories, but rather emotionally. She focuses on themes to bring the reader to the internal point at the end of the book where she is today. Her pictures of her son Adrian Brody on the set of The Pianist, in 2001, are used towards the beginning of the book to paint the picture of Hungary after the revolution.

Later she recounts through her pictures Eastern Europe’s shunning of Communism and its unsure stumbling towards democracy. Images of bombed buildings with bullet holes, an old woman sitting on a curb seeming to cry, and statues in disrepair, all taken in black and white, show a dark mysterious place through time that is lost and doubtful of the promise of healing from the west.

The most powerful moment of the book comes at the end when Plachy reveals her artistic and personal motivation for the book. Her book which is a metaphor for her life and titled Self Portrait with Cows Going Home is titled after a picture where she photographed herself through a car’s side mirror photographing a cow-herder walking his cow herd home.

The cows in the picture are a metaphor themselves for her, always getting walked to graze, and always returning back to the place where they started, just like she always returned back to Hungary. And it isn’t till the end that she acknowledges her obsession with her birthplace, her constant need to return, and her, as she describes it, “farewell to (the) long attachment to my birthplace."

Self Portrait with Cows Going Home is a powerfully evocative, intriguingly complex, and densely layered book about one woman photographer’s search for home. Ultimately she finds it in her husband and child; while embracing her life as a whole and letting go of her past. Sylvia Plachy has combined fabulous photographs of Eastern Europe, her life in the United States, her family and friends with wonderful accounts of memories to beautifully document one woman’s pursuit of happiness and ultimate transition into approval of her life.

>>Click here to purchase Self-Portrait With Cows Going Home from Amazon.com...

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