The contents of an album found in an antique shop in Rouen in 1999: male and female nudes, ancient ruins, idealised landscapes, another world still humming inside dominant culture at the beginning of the twentieth century; eighty-two reproductions: Guglielmo Pluschow (forty-eight), Wilhelm von Gloeden (twenty-five), and Vincenzo Galdi (nine), reproduced in the same order as the album; essays, chronological biographies of the photographers; parallel German English text.
