Marinelli, Mauro. Burden of Wings by Mauro Marinelli.

Kehrer Verlag, 2014. First edition, hardcover with protected dust jacket, fine with very good protected dust jacket faded along and near front of spine and slight wear at extremities, and short crease in bottom corner of rear panel of dust jacket.  112 pages. Photographs in cemeteries by Marinelli, taken with the instant Polaroid color process, mostly of funerary sculpture, with a thoughtful essay by him about the meaning of life and death.  About the book: "I used the Polaroid camera as a painter might use a sketchpad. I shot photos freely and, as the images appeared, I loved how the Polaroid photographs interpreted what I saw. The limitations of the plastic lens softened the features captured in stone; the softened stone wings became real wings."  "Mauro Marinelli's iconic cemetery images captured on Polaroid film juxtapose the inherent contradictions of the immediate moment: instant and everlasting. In homage to the sixteenth-century style of Nature Morte, the stone of mortuary sculptures softens like flesh and graveside tokens and bouquets of flowers depict life becoming death.”  Marinelli is also the creator of Old Timers: The Italians (1979).