On a very hot Mexican December day, with the birthday of Jesus a few days behind and just as the final hours of 2012 waned into a new year, I took a long walk and stumbled upon a cemetery. At first sight, it was nothing impressive. I meandered around rather nondescript large horizontal white marble slabs inscribed as expected with the names and dates of the deceased buried underneath. As I prepared to leave, I discovered a small door in an old wall with hints of color on the other side. Upon crossing the threshold, I took a step 200 years back in time into a netherworld of decaying stone and faded color. I would spend the next several days photographing remnants of religious artifacts standing guard over those long forgotten. My only companions were the occasional solitary iguanas, the only living sentry in this sometimes magical, sometimes forbidding universe.

This volume is dedicated to the representations of Jesus in three-dimensional and two-dimensional forms. Possible future volumes will feature Mary, Mother of Jesus; Jesus as Crucifix; the landscape of the cemetery and the many tombs from two hundred years ago to the present; and a fifth book with sepulchral still-lives inside and outside burial niches designed by the survivors and re-composed by time.