This short introduction to Rilke’s poem suggests some of the mystic and symbolist qualities that obviously captivated the mystic and symbolist photographer Josephine Sacabo. In the first of the Duino Elegies Rilke wrote,

. . . if longing overwhelms you, then sing of great lovers: even now
their famous passions are not yet immortal enough.
And sing of those you almost envy, those who were deserted, those you
found so much more loving than the successful ones. Begin
again and again the song that would praise their failure.

These words could easily be applied to much of Josephine Sacabo’s work. In Rilke’s Elegies she found a poet whose voice articulated the intense emotions of her own imagery. It is as if his great poem of love, death, and angels gave voice to her great subject, a subject not easy to define because her art, like Rilke’s, is more about emotion than facts, more about the senses and sense experience than it is about intellectual or mundane experience. It travels like electricity through the blood and comes out as sighs and tears; it has a madness about it like the madness of passionate love.

- From the Introduction by John Wood

I have heard more people than I can recall describe their first experience of seeing a Josephine Sacabo image. They say things like "I loved it" or "I just had to have it." I remember my own experience on first seeing one of her works; it was like an electrical charge rising out of the image and directly striking me. I thought, "I want to be able to look at this image every day for the rest of my life."

Our inarticulate attempts to describe the effect of her work is the result of having confronted Sacabo's duende, having been brought close to the precipice, and having felt, in the words of Spain's great poet Lorca, that "jet of blood worthy of her pain and her sincerity"that the duende inspired.   -John Wood

From the moment I made my first gravure, I realized I've been trying to do this for thirty years in the darkroom ...jumping through every hoop I can think of to come up with this effect. This is what I've been looking for...  -Josephine Sacabo

An exquisite form of image making, the hand-made photogravure is the aristocrat of the rarest, arcane photographic processes. Early masters, Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, all considered photogravures to be the most sensitive means of aesthetic expression. But it is a method so fine and difficult that it has ever since teetered on the edge of extinction in the modern world. In her mastery of gravure, with her eye and heart now extended to her hand, virtually no other important photographer today shows such a constellation of qualities. 
-John Stevenson

(josephinesacabo.com)