Search results for ""george f. thompson""

Paris Park Photographs features spectacular images from a dozen public parks and gardens in and near France's capital city. Exploring many of the same places that photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) made famous a century ago, Michael Kolster references the pleasures and pitfalls of wandering alone amongst trees and plants and sculpture, unkempt and formally designed places, tempered by the knowledge that the modern world with all its congestion is only a few short steps away. These intimate yet inherently expansive views of Paris’s parks invite closer scrutiny of the encounters awaiting us at the edges of the well-worn paths defining our daily lives. Few people venture into the frame of Kolster's photographs, but the promise of a renewed sense of hope and community resides in the details of his visual encounters and the moments of his heightened attention. Each picture speaks to us as a moment in time, even as the sequence suggests a choreography of place, one that can vary daily along with the changing moods and light of each park. Paris Park Photographs is presented in a bilingual English/French edition and concludes with an afterword by Michelle Kuo. Of note is how the book’s design is inspired by Walker Evans's 1938 classic work, American Photographs, making Kolster's book of immediate interest to photo and book collectors.

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_The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America_ is the first book to tell the story of the Black cowboy experience in contemporary America. Although Black cowboys have been a fixture on the American landscape and frontier since the nineteenth century, few people are aware of their enduring contributions to the history of the West and how their unique culture continues to thrive today in urban as well as rural areas all over the country.The book features Ron Tarver's beautiful, compelling, and often surprising contemporary images of African-American cowboys that not only convey the Black cowboy's way of life and its rich heritage, but also affirm a thriving culture of Black-owned ranches and rodeo operations, parades, inner-city cowboys, retired cowhands, and Black cowgirls of all ages, too. Tarver, who grew up in a family of Black cowboys in Oklahoma, uses his artistry to question, if not upend, long-held notions of what it means to be a cowboy and, with that, what it means to be an Ame

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Janet Pritchard’s romance with the American West began with horseback riding, watching movies, and hearing her dad’s dreams of being a cowboy. When she began to spend adolescent summers in Wyoming during the 1960s, her world changed forever, as she fell under the spell of natural wonder in the shadow of the Grand Tetons. Only later did she recognize her feelings as a response to what nineteenth-century Romantics called the sublime.A vintage 1916 picture postcard of Golden Gate Canyon by F. Jay Haynes inspired this project. When Pritchard turned it over and read the message face=Calibri>– “I cannot describe the Yellowstone as the dictionary is only a book. It is more than scenery. In some places, it is so beautiful that the men take off their hats, and the women are silent!” face=Calibri>– she was back in a childhood place of wonder tempered by a lifetime of work as an artist and teacher in landscape photography.Formed by fire and ice, embraced by a nation seeking an ancient past with a future as grand as the landscapes it inhabited, Yellowstone was established as the world’s first national park by an Act of Congress in 1872. One hundred fifty years later, the park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem continue to occupy an iconic role in the public imagination of Yellowstone as a place that is both real and ideal. Here, in this complex ecosystem where wild nature and culture meet, the complexities of our relationship to the natural world are revealed unlike any other place.Yellowstone is truly unique, and each generation who visits it invests Yellowstone with ideas, beliefs, and values reflecting its historical moment. In More than Scenery: Yellowstone, an American Love Story, Janet Pritchard surveys these relationships with her captivating photographs and insightful text, and Lucy R. Lippard’ sets the table with her heartfelt introduction to the world’s romance with Yellowstone. This book reveals why Yellowstone is so important to American and the world and how its landscapes reflect more than scenery.

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In 1998, Kevin Bubriski was fortunate to spend time with the Uyghurs in Kashgar, their ancient city on the Silk Road in Xinjiang, China. While there, he made unforgettable photographic portraits and street scenes that reveal a haunting beauty and sense of the past in old Kashgar. Bubriski was drawn to the faces of ordinary people and their daily lives, with the intent that through photographs mutual understanding between people might be fostered. Although 1998 was an uncomfortable time of rapid transformation for the Uyghurs, their oasis city in the high desert was still vibrant, even as the Chinese government’s brutal crackdown was about to commence. In the last few years, up to a million Uyghurs have been detained in “re-education camps” while others have been subjected to forced sterilizations and wider persecution. The vibrancy, beauty, and grit that Bubriski witnessed and photographed more than two decades ago has irrevocably changed.The Uyghur cultural, economic, familial, religious, and spiritual traditions are captured in Bubriski’s images and the extensive text by Tahir Hamut Izgil and the late Dru Gladney. These traditions, interwoven in Uyghurs’ lives and community for more than two millennia, have been severely impacted by the overt and disastrous policies of the Chinese government’s crackdown on Uyghur civil, spiritual, and cultural activities. The Uyghur community is now fractured and split due to widespread surveillance, mass detentions, and incarcerations. This book is also presented in a bilingual edition so that it is not only accessible to Uyghur people living in non-English-speaking regions of the world, but a way for Uyghurs around the world to reaffirm their cultural and social identity wherever they now live.As many Uyghur families are now separated due to detentions or flight to asylum elsewhere, the book is meant to be an enduring gift for the Uyghur people and for all who wish to understand better Uyghur culture and history. Bubriski’s book is a stunning work of art that reveals an earlier time when Kashgar, beloved city of the Uyghurs, retained much of its traditional life and charm.

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When winter snows cover Iceland in a sea of white, this volcanic island is transformed into an enchanting visual masterpiece that precariously rests on two tectonic plates in the North Atlantic just below the Arctic Circle. Ironically, the white blanket reveals more clearly the landscape's incredible geological formations and remote human settlements, eliciting a natural human response of wonderment. David Freese's profound, ongoing concern for our environmental predicament is once again manifested in his photographs of Iceland. By showing us what humankind is on the brink of losing, his images share and preserve his vision of this unique and special place. The award-winning Icelandic novelist, poet, and playwright Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir contributes a heartfelt afterword that adds her voice to the persistent warnings and alarms that have gone unheeded by too many for too long. As a citizen of Iceland, her testimony is that of a compelling witness. A small jewel of a book, Iceland Wintertide becomes a powerful coda to David Freese's Trilogy of North American Waters as the threats and ramifications of a warming climate steadily increase before our eyes. His photographs provide an added inspiration to act even in the face of those who purposefully deny only to protect their special interests.

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Vietnam is an ancient and beautiful land, with a deep history of occupational conflict that remains an enigma in Americans’ collective memory. It is still easy to forget that Vietnam is a country and not a war, even as America’s role in Vietnam inflamed and divided the American citizenry in ways that are still evident today. It is as if Vietnam’s civil war resurrected our own. And if you are a Vietnam War veteran or a family member of a vet, it’s worse, because, even after a half-century, many of the wounds won’t heal. What do you do when you have given up on forgetting? Chuck Forsman is one of a sizable number of aging Vietnam vets who have found deep satisfaction in revisiting Vietnam, supporting charities, orphanages, and clinics, doing volunteer work and more—anything to redeem what the U.S. military did there. He is also a renowned painter and photographer who depicts places and environments in ways that become unforgettable visual experiences for the contemporary viewer. Lost in Vietnam chronicles a journey, not a country. They were taken on visits averaging two months each and two-year intervals over a decade. Forsman traveled largely by motorbike throughout the country—south, central, and north—sharing his experiences through amazing photographs of Vietnam’s lands and people. His visual journey of one such veteran’s twofold quest: the one for redemption and understanding, and the other to make art. The renowned Le Ly Hayslip introduces the book and sets the table for Forsman’s incredible sojourn.

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Lynne Buchanan began photographing Florida’s inland waters to create artistic records of her connection with those waters and to learn lessons from being in the present moment and aligning with the flow of life. The more time she spent photographing waterways in her native Florida, the more she noticed what was being damaged and lost due to human impact. She resolved to draw attention to the situation through her photography and to work with water-quality and environmental advocates, from members of the Water-keeper Alliance to Native American citizens fighting to preserve the integrity of their ancestral lands and drinking water. The result is Changing Waters, which not only showcases the beauty, diversity, and complexity of Florida’s waters, but also documents the negative effects of agricultural and industrial pollution, a growing population with its urban growth and land development, and climate change on Florida’s inland and coastal waters and springs. Though her work is place specific, the book reveals the interconnected and global nature of environmental problems. Indeed, Florida’s fragile springs, wetlands, rivers, and coastal waters can be considered a tragic and powerful example of what is happening to aquatic systems else-where in the nation and world as a result of unchecked human action. Buchanan’s photographs invite viewers to consider their personal relationship to water and en-courage better stewardship of this vital––and finite––resource. They are also a call to action to find more effective ways to preserve these waterways for both their natural beauty and essential role in our survival.

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Varanasi, also known as Kashi and Banaras, is a city in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh dating to the 11th century B.C.E. Regarded as the spiritual capital of India, the city draws Hindu pilgrims who bathe in the Ganges River’s sacred waters for prayer and ritual. In Varanasi, one is in a time warp where one is living in history as if time has never stopped, for the people, both residents and pilgrims, continue their daily practices and worship in ways relatively unchanged for millennia, a continuum of thousands of years. Being in Varanasi is like being on a thread pulled from a cloth that dates back to the beginning of time. Here, one doesn’t “see” a ruin, as one does in other ancient civilizations, but a living city where history hasn’t stopped.David Scheinbaum guides us, with his camera, through the city’s winding streets that are filled with thousands of shrines and temples at virtually every turn. He takes us on an incredible visual journey to the Ganges, the sacred river where bathers are in prayer, and to the funerary Ghats, steps that lead down to the river where cremations take place, filling the air with incense and burning pyres. Hindus believe that being cremated along the banks of the holy Ganges allows one to break the cycle of death and rebirth and attain Moksha, (salvation) making it a major center for pilgrimages.David Scheinbaum’s beautiful, soulful photographs present an ancient, holy city immersed in prayer. Woven through are the words of B. J. Miller and Diana L. Eck, noted scholars and writers who each shed light on the special qualities that make Varanasi the holy city it has always been.

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"I am not sure there is any other pair of monosyllabic words in the English language that evokes as powerful a sense of place as Wall Street, except, of course, New York itself." So writes famed architectural critic Paul Goldberger in his introduction to one of the most important photographic books on New York City to appear since 9/11: David Anderson's On Wall Street. During the 1970s, a lot of glass-and-steel, boxlike buildings were going up in New York City. David Anderson realized that the architecturally elaborate and stylistic buildings of the late nineteenth century through the 1930s that defined Wall Street would never be made again. He thus embarked on a remarkable twenty-year project (from 1980 to 2000) to document Wall Street's classic architecture before further changes were made in the area, including the demolition and destructive renovation of too many historic structures.

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". . . as we anticipate the world of the twenty-first century,landscape architecture is at a crossroads. If the disciplineembraces ecological design and planning, then it has a leadershiprole in contemporary society throughout the world. If landscapearchitecture, however, turns inward and ignores its largerresponsibility to the public good, then it will become marginalizedand less relevant." --George F. Thompson and Frederick R.Steiner. The essays contained in this book are written by a cross section ofthe most respected teachers and prac-titioners of landscape designfrom around the globe. Ecological Design and Planning offers aunique opportunity to learn about the latest thinking and practicesin the art and science of ecological landscape design from suchleading lights as Michael Laurie, Carol Franklin, Laurie Olin,Elizabeth Meyer, Mark Johnson, and Ian McHarg. The common thread that runs through these essays is the authors'conviction that the growing rift in landscape design--ecology vs.aesthetics--is an artificial one. Each author expresses abidingconcern for the ecological preservation and enhancement of thesite, while demonstrating clearly--with both words andpictures--that the best designs are those that harmonize aestheticform and ecological function. Ecological Design and Planning is asource of ideas and inspiration for landscape architects andplanners, architects, and all those who understand the importanceof designing with nature. "It is high time that we citizens of the world begin to understandthat our situation on earth is not one in which nature must ruleover culture, or culture over nature, as if one can separate thetwo in the first place. It is high time to reflect upon thegeographies and landscape histories of the past throughout theworld so that we can bring forward--again--the concept that only bydesigning and planning with nature and culture can we begin to healthe landscapes and places of everyday existence--urban, rural, andwild--in environmental and aesthetic terms. 'God's own junkyard'need not continue to dominate our public landscapes, nor our ownbackyards and city streets." --George F. Thompson and Frederick R.Steiner New essays by: James Corner, Carol Franklin, Mark Johnson, MichaelLaurie, Ian L. McHarg, Elizabeth Meyer, Forster Ndubisi, LaurieOlin, Claire Reiniger, Sally Shauman, Meto Voom, and Joan HirschmanWoodward. Photographs by Steve Martino

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