Photographs by Sean Kernan. Writings by Jorge Luis Borges. Leetes Island Books, 1999. Review by Allen Ruch Skulls are etched with words that define a universe of infinite possibilities. Slain birds lie fallen on a page, blurring the clarity of scholastic meditations.
Angry nails crucify one text, while another is seen as a window into the starry universe itself.
These are just some of the remarkable images in The Secret Books , a new volume of pictures by the renowned photographer Sean Kernan, whose work uses Borges as a guiding star to navigate the space between the text and the imagination. And expressing a similar idea, Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book. More than just a way of perceiving the act of reading, these profound words contain something of a challenge as well. In a very real way, each book may be seen having a double life. But each book also revolves through a universe of readers, past, present and future, generating a multiplicity of worlds that collect, like ghosts, like secrets, into the pages of the work itself.