The portraits are stunning, creepy, weird. Beautiful and strange and powerful. The introduction is a waste of time, and the book is almost entirely images -- and then. Finally, at the end, small excerpts telling us a little bit more about the festivals all over Europe that these masks and costumes come from, a little bit more about the historical tradition, and the materials, and what these images are celebrating. I wanted that information first, or interleaved or somehow not hidden, but I can see how some of the power of the images is in the sheet incongruity, the mystery of imagining running into one of these figures alone in a landscape. Very cool, and I find the enormous and ubiquitous bells totally fascinating. ( )

Fascinating book with amazing photographs. I just wish the stories about the figures were more detailed. ( )