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Text by Kathleen Walker
While creating this book, the writer and the photographer visited the different missions in a chain established when the Spanish empire moved into California. Each site stands alone, unique in architecture, in history, in condition.
Visitors, often great groups of school children and their teachers, fill some missions. Silence is the hallmark of others.
Mission San Juan Capistrano has its own sense of both the solitude that comes with the dawn and at twilight and the vigor that comes with hundreds of thousands of visitors. For months, the writer and the photographer worked to capture the soul of this mission, to relate in words and pictures the mission's place in history, art, and architecture. In doing so, they did not discount the importance of the other California missions, which, like Mission San Juan Capistrano, carry their own sense of place and time.
The results can be found within these pages, telling stories woven from history and myths.
The people of Mission San Juan Capistrano, past and present, also have their say. The native people; the priests who walked El Camino Real, the royal road; visitors touched by the mission's marvel's; administrators, architects, archaeologists, artists, and blue-jeaned, hard-hatted workers who strive to hold the old mission together – they too tell their tales.
Amidst the excitement, the color, the movement of modern-day California, Mission San Juan Capistrano touches each visitor.
For some, the lasting mark may be the beauty of the place, or the faith, or the history, or the power of the builders who created the place. And for others, like the writer and photographer, it's a sense of the peace that lingers in the gardens, in the buildings, between the dawn and the twilight. |
