Flames Against the Dark

Flames Against the Dark Saving America's Sacred Sites uniquely draws together the apparent disparate qualities of our modern age with North America's prehistoric roots. It achieves this unusual synthesis with magically evocative photography of sacred sites. Far more than any documentary style, Lynn Butler's photographs capture the elusive spirit of traditionally holy locales. These include Wisconsin's Black River Fall, with its secret rock art, disclosed to the outside world for the first time since the last Ice Age, some ten thousand years ago.

There are the gaunt ruins of Aztalan, a ceremonial urban center still featuring the world's most northerly pyramids. Nearby, are Rock Lake and Spirit Lake. Across the Wisconsin border with Minnesota at the Mississippi River tower the Saint Paul Mounds, a 2,000-year-old astronomical computer oriented to the Constellation Pleiades. In far off Arizona, Canyon de Chelley was the final refuge of the Anasazi, and still reverberates with the genius energies of this vanished race.

Prehistory collides with contemporary history in California's own version of Shangri-La, where a people are dedicated to upholding their sacred heritage outside Monterey. Because it aimed at preserving the physical existence of a sacred site, their Bless the Eagle Ceremony conducted at Washington, D.C. was the most singular event of its kind.

All these hallowed places and events come alive in the remarkable visuals created by photographer Lynn Butler. Her personal approach to mysterious locations, as obscure as they are spiritually potent, results in originality encountered nowhere else. Many of her images were made while she rode horseback among tribal leaders from the vicinity of the Los Padres National Forest to public forums of our nation's capital and the White House. The editors of Newsweek magazine nominated the photographs as best art photography for the ICP Infinity Awards.

Flames Against the Dark: Saving America's Sacred Sites is inherently appealing to not only students and masters of nature and ethnic photography, but also to a broader audience of readers fascinated by the continent's ancient origins and living legacies, as embodied in North America's sacred sites and native peoples who revere and preserve them.