- No other recent publication offers such comprehensive coverage of the Angkor temples at the heart of Cambodia
The temples of Cambodia are among the most complex and imposing architectural creations in the world, offering nothing less than the embodiment of Khmer culture. Over a period of five hundred years successive rulers sought to build sacred spaces that bore witness to the presence of the gods and the legitimacy of the kings. Organised chronologically, this book opens with the modestly scaled brick structures of the seventh and eighth centuries and goes on to explore the first monumental temple mountains of the ninth century. Also examined are the technical advances enabling the fulfillment of a unique Khmer architectural vision in the tenth century, and the erection of the ambitious Baphuon temple mountain in the eleventh. All this sets the stage for the apogee of the Khmer empire in the twelfth century, and with it, the construction of three massive temple complexes: Beng Mealea, Bakan, and the supreme architectural creation of Cambodia, Angkor Wat.
In this book, not only do Barry Brukoff's photographs record temples that have been destroyed or vandalized but they offer something more: a uniquely intimate insight into the Cambodian idiom. The viewer is drawn into the picture plane and can sense the interior wonders of the monuments, so that for the first time a two-dimensional expression succeeds in invoking the third, in inviting the reader to penetrate to the heart of the temples' mystery.
Contents:
Origins; Embodying Power; Founding Angkor; Expanding the Empire; Monuments as Cosmos: The Age of Angkor Wat; The Universal Monarch; Chronology.
Helen Ibbitson Jessup is founder and President of the Board of Directors of Friends of Khmer Culture, an organization established to support Khmer arts and cultural organizations. A scholar and curator specializing in the art and architecture of Southeast Asia, she is the author of Art and Architecture of Cambodia, (Thames & Hudson), Passage to Angkor, with photographs by Kenro Izu (Channel Photographics), and Sculpture of Angkor and Ancient Cambodia: Millennium of Glory (Thames & Hudson). She was curator of the Sculpture of Angkor and Ancient Cambodia exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and co-curator of a recent exhibition of Khmer art in Zurich. She lives in Connecticut.
Barry Brukoff is an award-winning photographer whose books include The Enigma of Stonehenge, text by John Fowles (Summit); Morocco, text by Paul Bowles (Abrams); Greece: Land of Light, text by Nicholas Gage (Bulfinch); and Machu Picchu, text by Pablo Neruda in a new translation (Bulfinch). He has been photographing the temples of Cambodia since 1963. He lives in California.
