This book is a summation of my early years in Hungary. It is a farewell to my long attachment to my birthplace. When we left abruptly, in 1956, I thought I would never be allowed back, but like a ghost,I've been returning over and over again. Each trip, especially in the beginning, seemed miraculous: I embraced my friends and floated in and out of the past with my camera. From forty years of travel back and forth, I have brought back these images and stories, and offer them as a bouquet at the shrine of my childhood memory.

In 1956, in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution, thirteen-year-old Sylvia Plachy fled her native Hungary with her parents, carrying nothing but a small suitcase and a teddy bear, ultimately arriving in the U.S. in 1958.Self portrait with Cows Going Home Plachy's most complex and personal book to date is composed of a rhythmic cycle of photographs taken over the past forty years during several trips back to Eastern Europe, pictures from her own family albums, and stories of growing up there. Like fragments of both individual and cultural memory, the evocative images relate Plachy's search for her lost childhood and also serve as a personal history of Eastern Europe.

As a whole, the pictures in Self portrait with Cows Going Home interactnon-linearly to form a moving and innovative book that is experienced not as a narrative telling of Plachy's life, but with the intensity and mystery of memory itself. Recent photographs taken on the set of the film The Pianist, and in particular of her son Adrien Brody, are indicative of her ability to condense expansive layers of meaning within a single image: serving simultaneously as representations of Nazi-era Europe, as film stills, and as tender portraits of her son.