Praise for Temples of Cambodia:

“A magnificent journey through the remnants of the least-known of the great world civilizations.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Part of what makes Temples of Cambodia: The Heart of Angkor so appealing is its photographer's long-term vision and commitment.”—The New York Times

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, from the seventh to the twelfth centuries, successive rulers sought to build sacred spaces that bore witness to the presence of the gods and the legitimacy of the kings. This volume invites the reader to experience that remarkable architectural and spiritual achievement through extraordinary photographs and a text by a leading Khmer cultural historian.

Organized chronologically, the 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, the technical advances enabling the fulfillment of a unique Khmer architectural vision in the tenth, and the erection of the ambitious Baphuon temple mountain, among others, in the eleventh, all setting 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.

The glories of the Khmer temples do not lack for exposure in pictorial and scholarly publications. Yet no other recent publication offers such comprehensive coverage of the Angkor temples at the heart of Cambodia. What distinguishes this volume from the rest are Barry Brukoff's photographs. Mr. Brukoff has been photographing the temples for nearly half a century. Not only do his 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, 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.

About the Contributor(s)

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.

Helen Ibbitson Jessup is the author of Art and Architecture of Cambodia and Sculpture of Angkor and Ancient Cambodia: Millennium of Glory, and was curator of the related exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.