What is the soul? What is the Infinite? And what does it mean to discover the Divine within us?

Drawing upon the teachings of Swami Vivekananda, The Soul and the Infinite brings the philosophical and spiritual traditions of Vedānta into clear contemporary language while preserving their depth, spirit and universal character.

Through the nature of the Ātman and Brahman, karma, and the complementary paths of action, devotion, meditation and knowledge, the book explores a vision in which spiritual freedom begins with the discovery of what already lies within us.

At its heart is a profoundly universal idea: religions need not be rivals competing for possession of truth. Different traditions, cultures and human temperaments may represent different paths toward the same ultimate Reality.

Neither a new translation nor a scholarly reinterpretation, this is a modern reading edition—Pierre Toutain-Dorbec’s effort to allow Vivekananda’s voice to speak more directly across the distance of time.

An invitation to look beyond doctrine and difference, beyond the limits of the visible world, and toward the timeless relationship between the human soul and the Infinite.

Paperback · 96 pages · Full color
8.5 × 11 in. · Landscape
Creative Ventures, LLC & CSF Publishing · 2026
ISBN 979-10-90285-01-9
$19.00

Vārānasī, or the Perpetual Negation of Self brings together the photographs and poetry of Pierre Toutain-Dorbec, reflecting on life, death, spirituality, and the experience of Varanasi, India.

“Once I smelled Varanasi’s dust, a veil of death smothered my ignorance and my knowledge of perpetuity runs wild. Deeply moved, I write and photograph with a new awareness of life.”

— Pierre Toutain-Dorbec, conversation with Philippe Ganier-Raymond, Paris, 1985

Paperback — 72 pages
Black-and-white photography, printed in color
5.5 × 8.5 in. (14 × 21.6 cm), portrait format
ISBN 978-1-7360311-6-2

Resurrecting Ancestors: A Study of Presence grew from a lifelong fascination with the quiet humanity preserved in ancient busts and sculptures. Throughout my career as a photographer, I traveled through museums around the world photographing faces carved in marble, terracotta, and stone—visages shaped centuries ago, yet still carrying traces of the people they once were. Again and again, I found myself imagining the lives behind these frozen expressions: individuals who loved, suffered, hoped, feared, and moved through life much as we do today.

Through contemporary technology, I approach these sculptures not as archaeological artifacts, but as human presences suspended between memory and life. By gently replacing the cold texture of stone with the realism of living skin—while preserving every original proportion, expression, and sculpted detail—I seek to dissolve the distance between past and present.

The faces themselves remain faithful to the distant artists who first shaped them, yet something profoundly human reemerges through the return of a warm gaze and emotional presence.

This work is not an attempt to modernize antiquity, but an invitation to encounter another human being across time. Resurrecting Ancestors is ultimately a meditation on memory, mortality, and the enduring continuity of the human face.

Paperback — 128 pages
Full-color printing
7 × 10 in. (17.8 × 25.4 cm), portrait format
Perfect bound
ISBN 978-0-9802432-3-9

Ukraine: History Under Fire brings together Pierre Toutain-Dorbec’s photographs of war with texts examining Ukraine’s history and the broader geopolitical forces surrounding the conflict.

In Ukraine, Toutain-Dorbec has once again taken up his camera to bear witness to war. His photographs document the consequences of the Russian invasion for civilians—men, women, and children whose lives have been transformed in ways that may endure for decades.

Alongside these images, the author presents texts devoted to the history of Ukraine and his own analysis of the conflict. Informed by nearly sixty years of studying geopolitics, sometimes directly in the field, this perspective situates the present war within a longer historical continuum in which borders, identities, and power relations have repeatedly been contested.

Yet those portrayed are more than victims. They are survivors, revealing human strength and humanity in the face of death and destruction—people finding solace in music, art, family, neighbors, and complete strangers. The photographs show that wartime life also contains marriages, births, work, and the persistence of ordinary existence.

Together, photographs and texts form both a message of hope and an invitation to pause, reflect, and bear witness.

Paperback — 184 pages
Black-and-white photography, printed in color
5.5 × 8.5 in. (14 × 21.6 cm), portrait format
Perfect bound
ISBN 979-8-9890143-8-5

In Rust I Trust
Photographs by Pierre Toutain-Dorbec
Text by Joan Logghe

“Rust is irresistible. Like kisses, it is transient; like memory, it is crumbling.”

In In Rust I Trust, Joan Logghe reflects on Pierre Toutain-Dorbec’s photographs of aging automobiles and the unexpected beauty created by rust, oxidation, color, and time.

Photographed across New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Oregon, these abandoned and weathered cars become more than remnants of an earlier America. Toutain-Dorbec approaches their surfaces with the combined eye of photographer and sculptor, finding abstraction, texture, color, and what Logghe describes as the “alchemy of rust.”

Drawing a connection to the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi—the recognition of beauty in imperfection, impermanence, age, and decay—Logghe considers these automobiles as objects transformed by time. What was once manufactured, polished, and new gradually returns to the landscape.

The result is a meditation on photography, memory, transience, and the strange beauty of decay.

— Text by Joan Logghe, Poet Laureate of Santa Fe

Paperback booklet — 28 pages
Full-color printing
5.5 × 8.5 in. (14 × 21.6 cm), portrait format
Staple bound
ISBN 978-0-9802432-2-2

Tibet 1980s: A Photographer’s Journey brings together Pierre Toutain-Dorbec’s photographs and recollections from extensive travels through Tibet during the 1980s.

For centuries, Tibet—the “Roof of the World”—held an almost mythical place in the Western imagination. When Toutain-Dorbec traveled there in the 1980s, he encountered a society in which spiritual practice remained profoundly intertwined with the rhythms of everyday life.

Through black-and-white photographs and personal recollections, the book documents Tibetan daily life, religious traditions, monasteries, landscapes, and the people Toutain-Dorbec encountered during a period of extraordinary cultural and political change.

Having traveled extensively in Tibet and later published works in collaboration with the Dalai Lama, Toutain-Dorbec offers a personal record of a culture whose spiritual traditions and identity have faced immense pressures.

More than a travel document, Tibet 1980s is a photographic testimony to the spiritual and cultural life of the Tibetan people and a record of a world witnessed during a pivotal period in its history.

Paperback — 216 pages
Black-and-white photography, printed in color
5.5 × 8.5 in. (14 × 21.6 cm), portrait format
Perfect bound
ISBN 979-8-9890143-4-7

Places of Memory is a meditation on the relationship between photography, history, and remembrance.

Drawing on more than six decades of travel and photographic practice, Pierre Toutain-Dorbec creates images that move beyond the documentary record, weaving together original negatives, historical archives, and traditional silver-gelatin processes into unique visual compositions.

The photographs journey through cathedrals, battlefields, concentration camps, abandoned villages, landscapes, and enduring monuments to examine how places become vessels of collective memory and absorb the passage of time. Existing between fact and imagination, archaeology and art, they invite us to reconsider the scenery of history—not as a fixed record of the past, but as living spaces where personal memory and collective history remain in dialogue.

More than a collection of photographs, Places of Memory is a meditation on how we remember, what we choose to preserve, and why certain places continue to speak across generations.

Paperback — 100 pages
Black-and-white photography, printed in color
8.5 × 11 in. (21.6 × 27.9 cm), landscape
Perfect bound
ISBN 979-10-90285-02-6

Ukraine, Colors of Distress and Chaos is Pierre Toutain-Dorbec’s photographic meditation on the devastating impact of the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Through his use of light, shadow, faded tints, and dry-plate techniques, Toutain-Dorbec creates haunting images that convey the emotional consequences of invasion and conflict. The absence of human figures in many of the photographs heightens the sense of unease: ruined structures and scarred landscapes become witnesses to lives disrupted by war.

Toutain-Dorbec deliberately omits captions and explanatory narratives, allowing each photograph to stand on its own. Rather than imposing a single interpretation, he invites viewers to encounter the images through their own experiences and perspectives.

The resulting work is both a photographic document and a meditation on memory, destruction, and the human consequences of war.

Paperback — 64 pages
Full-color printing
5.5 × 8.5 in. (14 × 21.6 cm), portrait format
Perfect bound
ISBN 978-0-9802432-5-3

Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge: A Photographer’s Journey draws upon Pierre Toutain-Dorbec’s firsthand reporting and photography in Southeast Asia during the 1970s.

In the mid-1970s, as Southeast Asia convulsed under the pressure of war, revolution, and ideological struggle, journalist and photographer Pierre Toutain-Dorbec was living in Bangkok, reporting from the fault lines of history. Moving along the Thai–Cambodian border, he witnessed firsthand the human consequences of one of the twentieth century’s most radical revolutions.

When the Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh in 1975 and sealed Cambodia from the outside world, rumors spread across the borderlands. But the refugees arriving in Thailand carried stories far more disturbing than speculation. In months spent inside refugee camps, survivors spoke of forced marches, labor camps, hunger, and disappearances. From these fragments, a pattern slowly emerged—a system driven by uncompromising ideology and devastating human cost.

During this period, Toutain-Dorbec also encountered figures at the heart of the regime, including senior Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan, whose calm justifications exposed the unsettling distance between revolutionary certainty and human suffering.

Crossing into Cambodia on military operations and moving through landscapes fractured by war, he witnessed a nation caught between competing visions of salvation and survival.

Drawn from firsthand reporting, conversations with survivors and leaders alike, and photographs taken on the edge of catastrophe, this book explores how an idea—once armed and made absolute—can turn against the very people it claims to liberate.

Paperback — 208 pages
Black-and-white photography, printed in color
5.5 × 8.5 in. (14 × 21.6 cm), portrait format
Perfect bound
ISBN 979-8-9890143-9-2

Passage of Days
Photographs by Pierre Toutain-Dorbec
Text by John Biscello

Through a lens starkly, undertake a photographic odyssey into the sun-baked heart of Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains. Spanning the years 1975–1981, Pierre Toutain-Dorbec’s visits with the Imazighen people who live in the Imilchil region led to a visual record and testament to a pastoral way of life attuned to the cyclical flux of seasons, to the rhythms of nature herself.

This exquisite black-and-white collection reflects a chronologically compressed life in the day of the Imazighen, underscored by the interior narratives and silent stories implied in a stunning montage of portraits, while also capturing the grit, symmetry, and high-desert mystique of the resident landscape.

— Text by John Biscello

Paperback — 108 pages
Black-and-white photography, printed in color
8.5 × 8.5 in. (21.6 × 21.6 cm), square format
Perfect bound
ISBN 979-8-9890143-2-3

From the Forum to the Ghats is a collection of poems by Pierre Toutain-Dorbec.

“There is a strange, countering tension within each of these poems, between feeling inelastic and liberated all in the same instance. I’m reminded of Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti, of their strict formalism and their earthbound stakes that open nevertheless into the imagined above and then again into the spheres of demons and saints.”

— Christopher Hassett

Paperback — 68 pages
Grayscale printing
5.5 × 8.5 in. (14 × 21.6 cm), portrait format
Perfect bound
ISBN 979-8-9890143-7-8

Bearing Witness: An Essay for Gaza is neither a work of photojournalism nor a historical chronicle. It is an artist’s response to one of the worst human tragedies of our time.

Denied permission to enter Gaza and bear witness through his camera, Pierre Toutain-Dorbec turned instead to imagination. The images in this book are not documentary photographs. They are imagined visual compositions—artistic interpretations inspired by decades spent documenting war, displacement, and the resilience of the human spirit.

Accompanied by essays reflecting on the history of the conflict, the ethics of witnessing, and the responsibility of the artist, these images do not seek to reconstruct specific events. They seek to express the grief, dignity, fear, and hope that no lens can fully contain.

This is not a book about politics alone. It is a book about people.

For more than sixty years, Pierre Toutain-Dorbec has dedicated his work to preserving the memory of those whose lives have been shaped by conflict and injustice. In these pages, he departs from documentary photography without abandoning its moral purpose. The result is a deeply personal meditation on war, memory, and conscience.

History judges decisions. Art remembers the human beings who endure them.

Paperback · 100 pages · Printed in color
8.5 × 11 in. (21.6 × 27.9 cm) · Landscape
CSF Publishing · 2026
ISBN 979-10-90285-00-2
$19.00

Strolling in Rome with Claudia is a carnet de voyage of poems and photographs born from Pierre Toutain-Dorbec’s stay in the Eternal City.

“There is a strange, countering tension within each of these poems, between feeling inelastic and liberated all in the same instance. I’m reminded of Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti, of their strict formalism and their earthbound stakes that open nevertheless into the imagined above and then again into the spheres of demons and saints.”

— Christopher Hassett

Reflecting on his time in Rome, Pierre writes:

“The autumn of 2015, spent in Rome, marked a kind of personal renaissance. How wonderful it was to wander once again through the Eternal City—this time with my wife, Claudia.”

Paperback — 80 pages
Black-and-white photography, printed in color
5.5 × 8.5 in. (14 × 21.6 cm), portrait format
Perfect bound
ISBN 978-1-7360311-5-5

Ballads of Dust and Silence: Heroes and Legends Who Defined the American West

I was born and raised in Normandy, far from deserts or open rangeland, yet the American West entered my life early through television—through Rin Tin Tin, the male German Shepherd born in Flirey, France, who became an international film star after being rescued from World War I; through Wanted Dead or Alive, where Steve McQueen’s bounty hunter Josh Randall carried the distinctive shortened rifle known as the Mare’s Leg, a modified Winchester Model 1892; and through the American boys at my school, whose families remained stationed in France after World War II.

Later came late-night Westerns and weathered paperbacks. Long before I ever crossed an ocean, I carried its light and dust within my imagination. The cowboys, Native Americans, and the Wild West became less historical figures and more a posture of being—patient, solitary, and life-oriented.

Years later, when I settled in New Mexico, the landscapes felt strangely familiar, as though memory had preceded experience. I understood then that I was not discovering a place but encountering an image I had long carried.

This series of photographs is an homage—to the United States, the country I now call my own; to my American wife, Claudia, and the legacy of the West she carries; and to that vast, quiet frontier—once boundless in imagination before it revealed itself in the world.

Paperback — 140 pages
Black-and-white photography, printed in color
8.5 × 8.5 in. (21.6 × 21.6 cm), square format
Perfect bound
ISBN 978-1-937487-91-1

Metamorphosing Venice is Pierre Toutain-Dorbec’s intimate photographic and literary homage to a city that became both sanctuary and muse.

Floating somewhere between myth and legend, past and present, Venice is a sea-kissed dream of a city, a time-carved marvel that haunts the imagination. The Queen of the Adriatic, the City of Masks, the City of Bridges, La Serenissima.

Venice was Toutain-Dorbec’s home away from home across the years 1958–2003, and during the 1990s he maintained an apartment there. This book brings together memories from those decades as both a chronologically diverse testament to the culture and character of Venice and a deeply personal homage to the city.

Hand-colored candid photographs, poems, and short stories reflect the Floating City from many perspectives, juxtaposing the classical and the modern, the timeless and the ephemeral.

Metamorphosing Venice is a photographer and writer’s love letter to a city that continues to exist as an extraordinary feast for the senses.

Paperback — 80 pages
Full-color printing
5.5 × 8.5 in. (14 × 21.6 cm), portrait format
ISBN 979-8-9890143-3-0

Benares 1968–2000: A Photographer’s Journey traces Pierre Toutain-Dorbec’s relationship with one of India’s most ancient and sacred cities across more than three decades.

Benares is not a city one visits only once. It remains—etched in memory, in scent, in sound—returning to those who have walked its riverbanks and alleys. Between 1968 and 2000, these photographs were made during the author’s numerous visits to the City of Light: fragments of time gathered like offerings along the Ganges.

The images in this book do not attempt to define the city. Instead, they hold traces of devotion and daily life, fire and water, silence and tumult. They are the author’s memories shaped by encounters, by patience, and by the slow work of looking, observing, and interpreting.

Benares 1968–2000: A Photographer’s Journey is not only a meditation but also a memoir. It tells the story of a long relationship with a city, of repeated returns, and of the transformations they inscribed on both place and self.

The photographs are joined by reflections recalling moments of wonder and doubt, discovery and loss—personal history intertwined with the timeless rhythms of Benares. The work becomes at once a portrait of the city and a remembrance of a life lived in dialogue with its wonders.

Paperback — 204 pages
Black-and-white photography, printed in color
5.5 × 8.5 in. (14 × 21.6 cm), portrait format
ISBN 979-8-9890143-6-1

War-Torn Ukraine
Photographs by Pierre Toutain-Dorbec
Text by Claudia Toutain-Dorbec
Preface by Patrick Vinck and Phuong Pham, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative

Limited availability — only 15 copies remain.

War-Torn Ukraine documents the human consequences of the Russian invasion through Pierre Toutain-Dorbec’s black-and-white photographs, accompanied by text by Claudia Toutain-Dorbec.

The photographs portray not only the destruction of war, but the resilience of people living through it. Men, women, and children continue to seek solace in music, art, family, neighbors, and even strangers. Ordinary life persists alongside devastation—in work, relationships, marriages, births, and moments of hope.

Patrick Vinck and Phuong Pham of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative write that Toutain-Dorbec’s photographic account is likely to become part of the collective memory of the Russian invasion and its consequences for civilians. Their preface considers the photographs as testimony to both the suffering and humanity of people whose lives have been transformed by war.

Photographs from this body of work were also exhibited at Harvard University in connection with an invited presentation by Pierre Toutain-Dorbec.

Paperback — 130 pages
Black-and-white photography printed in duotone
8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4 cm), portrait format
ISBN 978-1-7360311-9-3