Jean-Marc Bustamante began his photographic work in 1978 with the series Tableaux, and moved from there into sculpture. Deliberately sticking to simple forms, well-defined themes and materials, he renews, re-enlivens the first, most basic bodily and visual relations that one experiences before a piece of art. At the same time, his work leads directly up to the present. What does it mean for us to perceive, ponder, or incorporate an image or a sculpture today? The essays in this volume, covering the work created to this date, discuss the role of photography in contemporary art, the duality of sculpture in its optical/tactile relations to the viewer's body, the ideas of landscape, architectural space, and the place of the work. Together they attempt to define the multi-form notion of "presence" formulated by Bustamante.

"Ilona Karmel once wrote of the work of turning 'the cold, old-fashioned, iron key of memory.' These recovered poems of Ilona and her elder sister Henia open the space behind memory's door, and it is on fire with defiant passion -with longing, with terror, and the raw drive to bear witness in the one way possible to the life-in-death of the camps. Henia writes, 'These poems came about when I was still creating myself.' The two sisters here are speaking themselves and each other into existence; and this essential work of claiming our humanity has rarely been so costly, and so moving."--Allen Grossman
"The book is a riveting read. The subject, of course, is very compelling and the poems move with great plainness, vividness, and force. The girls survived, though barely, because they were young and strong and because the German war machine needed their bodies. The book is artfully designed to convey the arc of their story from capture to freedom in 1946, and there is, as far as I know, nothing quite like it in the vast literature of the Holocaust. A unique and moving book, of historical significance, rendered into English by one of our most gifted American poets."--Robert Hass