Holiday Books: Curiosities from The New York Times By KATHRYN HARRISON Published: December 3, 2010

Bullfighting. Flamenco. Religious pilgrimage. On the face of it, little in Lena Herzog’s earlier monographs prepares her audience for LOST SOULS (de.MO ­design, $54), photographs taken in “cabinets of curiosities,” collections of anatomical specimens dating back to the 17th century. But if the denial of death inspires the making of a photograph, fixing a moment so that it never ends and freeing its subject from the annihilation of time, preserving a fetus in a bottle answers a similar impulse. Enlarge This Image From “Lost Souls”; courtesy of Lena Herzog Specimens from the University Museum of Human Anatomy in Turin, Italy. Restored to an indefinite amniotic bath of chemicals — at a time when microcephaly, conjoined twins, cyclopia and other congenital anomalies presented as many physical as spiritual questions — Herzog’s lost souls are those belonging to infants we call “unviable.” Never buried or laid to rest, they are lost in space as well as time, citizens neither of the underworld nor of our own, not dead but arrested on the cusp of living. They are imminent and never arriving, both mortal and immortal, barred, Herzog says, from “heaven, hell or limbo.”

Read the full NY Times feature on the incredible photo book, here. See also: Anatomical Preparations, Avian Anatomical Specimens in the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, Descriptive Catalogue of the Anatomical and Pathological Specimens...