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). 

Mauro Marinelli is an American fine art photographer, author, and former photojournalist known for his intimate documentary projects and evocative, atmospheric imagery. Raised in White Plains, New York, by Italian immigrant parents, he earned a BFA in Photography and English from Manhattanville College in 1977, drawing early artistic inspiration from teachers like Ralph Gibson and Eva Rubenstein. In the late 1970s, Marinelli traveled across the United States to document aging first-generation Italian immigrants, culminating in his acclaimed first photo book, Old Timers: The Italians (1979). Seeking a shift away from commercial photography, he moved to upstate New York to operate a general contracting business and farm culinary herbs while continuing his artistic practice. His later published collections include The Burden of Wings (2014), featuring Polaroid imagery captured in international cemeteries, and Under Old Stars: Wanderings in Italian Hill Towns (2016), cementing his reputation for blending personal heritage, storytelling, and visual poetics.