Madagascar

Madagascar presents 30 black-and-white photographs by Spanish photographer Pancho Saula that capture the light and contours of this unique island. Madagascar is one of the most remote and beautiful countries in the world, and one of the very few places that has not yet been transformed by the deracinations of globalization: some areas are still untouched by tourism, and some ethnic groups, such as the Vezo, live in isolation in primitive conditions. Time stops in Madagascar, and nature is rich and intact: the vast majority of the island’s abundant flora and fauna exist nowhere else on earth. Ancient baobab trees tower above; enormous sand dunes envelop seaside fishing towns. Superbly printed in this handsomely designed volume, Saula’s photographs of the island range from the near-abstract to clear-eyed but sensitive portraiture.

Afterword by Joel Meyerowitz
“Madagascar is not a travel book about the beauties of this place, or its people. I opened this slender volume and was immediately taken into the personal, poetic, and very tactile experience that the artist had when he was there. The work is delicately balanced, frame by frame, to offer the reader the intimate sensations Pancho had of the light, the textures, the spaces that we too might notice-even things as insubstantial as the weight of shadows under the tropical sun-and he subtlety suggests as well the kinds of lives lived there in all their quotidian and understated simplicity. But what is truly beautiful to me is the delicately whispered ambiguity of meaning that the photographs carry”