Miyelo

Rating:
Summary: Ghostly dance
Review: One of the many talents of artist Viggo Mortensen has is to somehow photograph anything at all, and give it an aura of mystery. If the subject is already interesting, then Mortensen's photographs are outright fascinating. Mortensen's "Miyelo" is a photography book that is more than just a book, but an experience.

"Miyelo" is a collection of photographs focusing on the Lakota Ghost Dance, a recreation of a dance first performed in South Dakota in the late 1800s. Along with these photographs are more items related to the Ghost Dance -- Mortensen's own words, essays by experts of all stripes, chants, and quotations from everybody from Mark Twain to Crazy Horse to Lao-Tze.

"Miyelo" is one of those books that leaves you a bit dizzy after you've finished it. Mortensen shot the photographs for this book while filming the movie "Hildago" in the California desert. The result is surreal but extremely effective, almost like a vision of the past.

Mortensen's photography is never more entrancing than it is here. Just about every photo is shimmering and blurred, like a hallucination or a mirage. It gives the entire book the quality of a dream set on paper. "Miyelo 15" features a Lakota man standing in front of a shimmering desert landscape, while "Miyelo 5" shows only a series of transparent figures that seem to be moving. Living up to the name of the dance, these people look like ghosts.

Accompanying the photographs are Mortensen's foreword (which reads almost like poetry): "After one of the dryest summers in memory, nearly all green had bled from the landscape, leaving cottonwood bark tatter and twig tip as grey as reflected dawn on the creek; pale as wrist scar, frost grass, clay cut bank and barely there clouds running for cover to the Black Hills."

But as wonderful as the essays and foreword are, it's Viggo Mortensen's dreamlike photography that makes this book truly unforgettable. Vibrant, hallucinatory and bittersweet, this is a keeper.