San Antonio's Spanish Missions : A Portrait

Since their construction in the eighteenth century, San Antonio's Spanish missions have held a fascination for visitors and residents alike. This elegant coffee-table volume displays more than one hundred color photographs by architectural photographer Mike Osborne. It provides a distinctive contemporary portrait of the five mission complexes, now partly restored, partly still in ruins. One, better known as the Alamo, is a memorial to its defenders in 1836. The four others comprise San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. Each section includes a rare nineteenth-century image, several previously unpublished.

Mike Osborne is an artist and photographer based in Austin, Texas. He studied photography at Stanford University and at the University of Texas at Austin. More recently he has been a Fulbright Fellow in Taiwan and a resident artist at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany. His architectural photographs have appeared in San Antonio Portrait, published in 2005, and in numerous national and international publications.