Search results for ""George F. Thompson""

Occupying Massachusetts: Layers of History on Indigenous Land is an art book that engages with history. Featuring photographs of dwellings and vernacular structures found in rural Massachusetts, the book is a meditation on the human occupation of land, with an emphasis on the long presence of Indigenous people and the waves of settlement by people from other countries that began during the early 1600s and continues today.Utilizing a muted color palette, Matthews's photographs of both structures and historical markers are subtle and haunting. They suggest the presence of histories, embedded in the landscape but often invisible. Although the book is focused on Massachusetts, it implicitly raises larger issues of settlement and nationhood. How did the United States of America come to occupy its land? How is this story told? As a longtime occupant/occupier of Massachusetts herself, Matthews aims to understand more deeply the land on which she lives.The main text of the book comes from photographs of historic markers, which were installed around the state at different times by different interest groups. The words on these markers describe early relations between Indigenous people and largely English settlers, from diverse points of view. In this way, the book explores how difficult histories are written and how they change over time. Concluding essays by Indigenous activist David Brule and poet Suzanne Gardinier provide important perspectives as well, connecting the past and future. Occupying Massachusetts is a moving story whose message will be appreciated for years to come.

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On August 3, 2019, a mass shooting occurred at Walmart Supercenter #512 in El Paso, Texas. A twenty-one-year-old white supremacist from El Paso targeted “Mexicans” and shot and killed twenty-two people - thirteen Americans, eight Mexicans from nearby Ciudad Juarez, and one German - and injured twenty-seven others. It was the seventh deadliest mass shooting in the United States since 1949 and the deadliest attack on Hispanic and Latina/o Americans in U.S. history.This book and the traveling exhibition that accompanies it are meant to honor the memory of those twenty-two beautiful, innocent beings who lost their lives in El Paso on that summer day and to help heal not only the twenty-seven others who were injured, but the countless others in America, New Zealand, Norway, and the world who suffer and have suffered from hate in whatever form it takes. All royalties earned from the sale of the chapbook and all special collections received at the exhibit are being donated to the families of those who died and were injured on that fateful day in El Paso.

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Near the homes of photographers John Willis and Tom Young is a paper mill that sits in the otherwise pristine and picturesque climes of western Massachusetts. For Willis and Young, this site is one of both aesthetic and philosophical contradictions: despite its verdant locale, the mill—with its smokestacks and countless bales of discarded paper—brings to mind the dreariness of industrialization and the impermanence of life itself. But the factory is actually one where such litter is reborn as reusable paper. Willis and Young’s quadtone photographs transform this mill and the innumerable mounds of recyclable waste it processes daily into an indelible and evocative landscape. Recycled Realities is not a jeremiad foretelling the consequences of excessive waste, rampant pollution, or unbridled consumption but rather a profound meditation on the hidden connections and meanings that linger beneath the debris and detritus of everyday life. These unforgettable images of discarded paper from the printed world trace the processes of emergence, revelation, and redemption that make the cycle of life possible.

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There is no more beautiful or alluring coast in the world than the West Coast of North America: a 5,000-mile-long region that extends from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska to Canada's British Columbia, south to Washington, Oregon, and California, and then to Baja California in Mexico. No photographer until David Freese has explored the various and wondrous landscapes along the Pacific Ocean in such depth, making this the first book to look comprehensively at what makes the natural beauty of this particular coast so memorable. Behind the scenery, of course, lie the geologic forces that have created the West Coast landscapes that we now admire, explore, and praise. The engaging and informative text by renowned author Simon Winchester grounds us in understanding the deep relationship between geology and scenery. And Naomi Rosenblum, the esteemed photographic historian, writer, curator, and art critic, firmly establishes David Freese's place among the great landscape photographers of the past and present. In every photograph, his unique vision of nature and of place comes shining through. West Coast: Bering to Baja is a major publishing enterprise that will appeal to book-lovers of photography, nature, and those who dream about visiting and touring North America's West Coast. For here we see the vital connection between art and science merge in ways previously unseen for this special region of the world.

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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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Climate change is the great existential reality of our time. How we approach this crisis will affect life on Earth for present and future generations. In spite of our collective ideals, irreversible damage to the environment is imminent and represents urgent local and global concern. Through artfully rendered photographs of an acutely endangered landscape, Oceano: An Elegy for the Earth explores the deep paradox between the devout, powerful presence of nature and environmental loss and damage.Extending eighteen miles along Central California’s famed coastline and divided into both a natural preserve and a state vehicular recreation area, the Oceano Dune complex has long fascinated photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward and Brett Weston. The ephemeral, ever-changing landscape here expresses a sublime order and reflects many correlations between land and the dynamics of human society. Using metaphors that inspire hope and explore impermanence and darkness contrasted with the purity of suffusing light, Ulrich’s photographs have been likened to Mark Rothko’s “silence and solitude” that express the resonance and subtle dimensions of consciousness.The coastal environment of the Oceano Dunes is tempered by multiple threats such as incessant motorized activity, the toxicity of surrounding industrial-scale agriculture, and some of the worst air quality in the nation. Thus, for the book’s sequence of images, the photographer employs the literary form of an elegy, an extended reflection and lamentation on Earth during the early twenty-first century. An elegy refers to a poetic reflection of sorrow and love, often for a transient, mortal entity. As Ulrich writes: “Sorrow and love for Earth, indeed. No better articulation exists for my regard for our dying planet and common mother.”

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Photography and meditation are known to facilitate reflection and introspection. They teach us to see both the outer world and the mysterious landscape within. In Nowhere in Place, photographer Christopher Jordan explores the meeting place between meditation and photography and how this mirroring of outer and inner worlds plays upon both the surface of his consciousness and the sensor of his digital camera. Before Jordan ventures outside to make pictures, he spends time in quiet meditation. This is an important process of switching gears from the everyday noise of the cluttered mind to a more serene state of awareness. This reset allows Jordan to see the world in fresh ways, appreciating overlooked details that might escape a mind preoccupied with business-as-usual. The book starts in Tuscaloosa, where Jordan lives. For many, T-town is a place of Southern charms and Alabama football, but, for Jordan, it becomes a visual play of textures, colors, and abstract planes with nary a person in sight. The pictures reveal a placeless solitude within the frame of his camera. The book moves west to Boulder, another college town, where his contemplative eye continues to fix upon unusual shapes, colors, and textures while intersecting with an occasional figure. The book reaches full bloom in India, where the interplay between inner and outer landscapes knows no bounds, as his camera reveals a kaleidoscopic interplay of people, places, and things. Within each locale, Jordan photographed “nowhere” in particular, because, for him, the photograph becomes a place of its own being: a sanctuary for meditation, a record of what is seen and heard and felt, an opportunity to see a place and an image right now. For Jordan, the photograph is a medium of meditation and transcendence, providing a point of intersection where one recognizes our shared, common humanity.

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Photographer John Willis has long been aware of the exploitation that can occur when photographers enter communities as outsiders. So, in 1992, when he first visited the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, he assured elders of the Oglala Lakota nation that he would not exhibit any of his images. Over time, however, Willis earned the respect and trust of the community, and the elders urged him to show his work and create this book so that others might better understand Lakota land and life. Willis has returned to the reservation every year since 1992, and he has come to grasp and interpret this place as few others have. Views from the Reservation, first published to widespread acclaim in 2010 and now presented in an updated and expanded edition, remains a gift—a wopila—that is meant to open the minds, eyes, and hearts of outsiders to the life, culture, and conditions of the Oglala Lakota people. Along with his insightful and accomplished images, Willis has enlisted other voices to offer a more complete story: Lakota elders and high school students from the Pine Ridge Reservation offer powerful poems; writer Kent Nerburn contributes an original essay; Emil Her Many Horses, a curator at the National Museum of the American Indian, tells his story of growing up on the rez; Kevin Gover, Director of the National Museum of the American Indian, apologizes for the government’s abuse of native people; Oglala Lakota artist Dwayne Wilcox shares his provocative ledger drawings; and members of the Reddest family present their amazing photo collection. Views from the Reservation is a masterful book that has been praised by the Lakota people for its honesty, spirit, and depth. It offers the chance for native peoples and outsiders alike to appreciate and respect the Pine Ridge Reservation from contemporary and historical points of view, with art and storytelling leading the way.

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Fish Town is an inspired documentary project focused on preserving, through photography and oral history recordings, the cultural and environmental remains of southeastern Louisiana's fishing communities. Owing to a dying wild-caught seafood industry and a rapidly vanishing coastline, the places and people who are multigenerations deep in Louisiana's fishing traditions have been quietly slipping into extinction for decades, many without a form of historic preservation. These are the same towns that not only have made New Orleans an epicenter of fresh seafood dining but have traditionally served as getaway places for New Orleanian families, an escape to nature where time can be spent together sport fishing on the lakes and bayous and gathering around crab and crawfish boils. J. T. Blatty has been traveling ""down the road"" from her home in New Orleans since 2009, capturing these places and people as no one previously has.Fish Town includes 137 color photographs taken by Blatty between 2012 and 2017. Interspersed throughout are text narratives transcribed from audio recordings with long-standing members of the fishing communities, many of whose ancestors came to Louisiana during the late 1600s.

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People love dogs, and dogs love people. Walking a dog is one of the most visible and mutually beneficial manifestations of that bond. It is a ritual steeped in affection and obligation. It doesn’t have a day off. It doesn’t pay the bills or clean the dishes or do the laundry. Still, people and dogs alike gain the benefits of exercise, socialization, shared experiences and observations. Another benefit, often overlooked, is the pleasure of mutually indulging a trait that ordinary dogs share with extraordinary people: curiosity. This book is, in many ways, an ode to curiosity. Walking Magpie is about a dog and what a dog sees. It is also a work of serious photography by a well-known and pioneering landscape artist: Chuck Forsman, who, for more than forty years, has been a keen observer of the interface between landscape and culture as expressed through his paintings and photographic art. As a result, Forsman often goes to places that might not be on everyone’s radar screen. In this book, Forsman took a camera with him during his walks with Magpie, the family dog. Often, these walks are in the neighborhood and surrounding hills where Forsman lives: near the Flatirons in Boulder. But Magpie joins Forsman on other adventures, from Alaska and the Northwest Territories of Canada to Florida, Ohio, and New York City. The intent is to turn these experiences into art. With each picture we sense mystery rather than clarity, questions about place rather than answers. We hardly can know what a dog knows, but with this book we can appreciate better what a dog sees and senses and experiences, helping the human and canine imagination to meld, at least a little. Walking Magpie is published in conjunction with a retrospective of Chuck Forsman’s photographs at the Denver Art Museum in October 2013. Published in association with the Denver Museum of Art.

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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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Twice the size of Central Park, Rock Creek Park is the wild, wooded heart of Washington, DC, offering refuge from a frantic city pace to millions of visitors each year. Rock Creek Valley, which serves as the spine of the national park, has a long and storied history - from Amerindians who fished the creek, hunted the woods, and quarried the rock outcroppings, to Euro-Americans' claims on the land as mill sites, to widespread deforestation during the American Civil War, to its ecological restoration and designation as a federal park in 1890. Melanie Choukas-Bradley, renowned naturalist and writer, spent a year in Rock Creek Park walking and skiing its trails at all times of day, observing and recording natural events in all seasons and weather conditions. Enhanced by the evocative photographs of Susan Austin Roth, A Year in Rock Creek Park takes readers on an incredible and unforgettable journey.Distributed for George F. Thompson Publishing.

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Ireland is a place of mystical, enduring appeal, especially for the many millions of Americans who claim its special heritage, more than one in six according to the last U.S. Census. But Ireland has also become an international place of pilgrimage and discovery for all who venture there. This unique collaboration between Elizabeth Billups, a Santa-Fe-based photographer and activist, and Gerry Adams, the renowned leader of Sinn Fein, reveals a side of Ireland―and of Gerry Adams―not often portrayed in the guidebooks or magazines or news media. In this special book, the two kindred spirits wander the country together and share a deep love of the land and its people, with Ms. Billups taking gorgeous photographs and sharing her experiences and Mr. Adams contributing additional stories, tales, and facts about his country and his family's history. While Mr. Adams has written many acclaimed books concerning his political vision for Ireland, until now he has refrained from sharing his affection for his native land. And so, with Ms. Billups, we are able travel to his and her favorite places, the places that, to them, bespeak of Ireland as one island without borders. Looking at Ms. Billups's beautiful and captivating photographs—and reading her text and Mr. Adams's family stories, personal anecdotes, and relevant historical details, legends, and myths—we come to understand why Ireland is such a special place and why he fought so long and hard to achieve peace for the many generations to come. ** Nominated for a 2015 IPPY Award" from the Independent Publishers Association **

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Honoring the Doughboys: Following My Grandfather's World War I Diary is a stunning presentation of contemporary photographs taken by the author that are paired with diary entries written by his grandfather, George A. Carlson, who was a soldier in the U.S. Army during World War I. Lowdermilk followed his grandfather's path through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany and returned with these meticulously crafted photographs and his own engaging stories that bring the diary to life for contemporary readers. Lowdermilk's passion for World War I and military history began as a young boy when he listened to his grandfather tell his stories about serving as an infantryman— a "doughboy"—in Europe during the Great War. When his grandfather passed away in 1983, Lowdermilk's mother gave him her father's diary, which included not only lengthy descriptions of the landscapes, towns, and battles he had experienced, but also keen observations and insights about life as a doughboy for Mr. Carlson and his buddies. Lowdermilk became fascinated with the diary, first transcribing it and then plotting his grandfather's course. He immersed himself in the history of World War I and its geography, eventually retracing, more than a dozen years, the path of his grandfather's journey. This image-rich tour of European landscapes, battlefields, and monuments offers the reader an experience that is at once an intimate reliving of Carlson's time as a doughboy, a lively collection of Lowdermilk's travel anecdotes, and a moving expression of gratitude to American veterans of the Great War. The foreword by Helen Patton, granddaughter of General George S. Patton, Jr., adds an extra dimension to the narrative. ** Nominated for a 2015 IPPY Award" from the Independent Publishers Association **

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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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The Schuylkill River flows more than 100 miles from the mountains of the Pennsylvania Coal Region to the Delaware River. It passes through five counties - Schuylkill, Berks, Chester, Montgomery, and Philadelphia - and its valley is home to more than three million people, yet few are aware of the hidden ruins and traces left by a pioneering 200-year-old inland waterway: the Schuylkill Navigation. Some of it is literally buried in their own backyards.Often called the Schuylkill Canal, this complex Navigation system actually boasted twenty-seven canals. The first of the anthracite-carrying routes in America, the 108-mile Navigation shadowed the Schuylkill River for nearly all its length. It once had more than thirty dams and slackwater pools, more than 100 stone locks, numerous aqueducts, and the first transportation tunnel in the nation. They were all built by hand starting in 1816.In the 1940s, as part of a massive environmental cleanup of the river, this important and influential infrastructure was largely dismantled - but not entirely. Two short sections of the watered canal get plenty of attention: the Oakes Reach at Schuylkill Canal Park near Phoenixville and the Manayunk Canal in Philadelphia. Both are popular recreational destinations. What happened to the rest of it?Photographer Sandy Sorlien resolved to find out. Over the course of seven years, she traveled upriver repeatedly to bushwhack along the riverbanks and to row and paddle in the river itself. Armed with camera and binoculars, loppers and trekking poles, nineteenth-century maps and modern satellite imagery, and abetted by local historians and an archaeologist, she found all sixty-one lock sites and explored most of the canal beds. Her photographs reveal a mysterious remnant landscape, evidence of a bold industrial innovation that spelled its own demise. The water pollution created by the coal industry and obstructive dams meant the end of a way of life for the towns that boomed along the canals, from Pottsville to Reading, Birdsboro to Phoenixville, Bridgeport to Philadelphia.Along with Sorlien's full-color plates and explanatory essays, Inland features a selection of historic images, rare historic Schuylkill Navigation Company maps, and early Philadelphia Watering Committee plans. The book also includes a foreword by renowned landscape scholar John R. Stilgoe, an essay on regional transportation history by Mike Szilagyi, Trails Project Manager for the Schuylkill River Greenways Natural Heritage Area, and an afterword by Karen Young, Director of the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center. A sweeping new Schuylkill River map by Morgan Pfaelzer connects it all. Inland is the first to present contemporary photographs from a survey of the entire Schuylkill Navigation, becoming an essential resource for future historians and a resonant visual history all its own.

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Amnon Weinstein, an Israeli master luthier (violin maker), began a project more than years ago that may be one of the most creative, effective, and magnificent approaches to education on the topic of the Holocaust. Trained by three of the most revered Cremona, Italian luthiers of the twentieth century, Weinstein’s vision was to restore violins that survived the concentration camps and the ghettos, even when their owners often did not. To date, more than seventy violins have been restored to their highest playable condition. Following restoration, these hauntingly beautiful instruments have been used in performances by symphonies in Berlin, Cleveland, Istanbul, London, Quebec, Paris, San Francisco, and many other cities across the world. Purposefully, Weinstein makes certain that young musicians as well as members of some of the world’s most famed orchestras perform on them to packed concert halls. In doing so, it’s as if the past owners of the instruments return to fill the listener-observer’s mind and body.In Violins and Hope, Daniel Levin has made the most compelling and beautiful series of photographs documenting Weinstein’s collection of violins, his workshop in Tel Aviv, and his processes for restoration. This book is not a document of place, as much as it is a document of the ethereal. For what Weinstein has done with these lost violins has been to transform tragic loss into triumph in the most inciteful and powerful way imaginable. The care that Levin has taken to hone in on the idiosyncrasies of Amnon’s workshop, and his uncanny ability to celebrate the beauty of light, is nothing short of remarkable.The book’s foreword is written by arguably the most well-suited individual anywhere. Born in Austria, Franz Welser-Möst is one of the most acclaimed conductors of the twenty-first century. He has been Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra since 2002, and, under his direction, The Cleveland, as it has been fondly named by The New York Times, has had twenty international tours, with shimmering reviews. All too aware of his ancestry, Welser-Möst takes on our mutual history as no one else could. And the book concludes with Levin’s interview with Assi Weinstein, Amnon’s wife, who talks about the Violins of Hope project and its enduring legacy.

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Viewing Mni Wiconi (Sacred Water of Life) and the No Dakota Access Movement as an isolated happening without acknowledging historical, cultural, and systematic circumstances leading up to it makes no sense. We cannot erase this past nor change it. In order to move forward in a better way, however, we must acknowledge the truthful foundation and recurring practices complicating what to some feel like isolated incidences. The pervasive and growing presence of extreme economic inequality in America is a worsening condition. Few situations reveal this inequality more than the conditions that Native Americans live under within their own homeland. This book raises awareness of Water Protectors for those who were not at Standing Rock and honoring those who were, through experiences at the Oceti Sakowin Camp, the indigenous-led resistance movement by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe against the Energy Transfer Partners project to build the Dakota Access Pipeline on sacred land. The goal is to acknowledge and better understand the dedication of the Water Protectors, as they chose to be called, standing up for the health of Mni Wiconi and so many other related causes for the seven generations representing the past, present, and future health of all. People throughout the world, including members from between 240–300 indigenous tribes, were attracted to the cause and came to Standing Rock in full support of the protests. Even American military veterans, distressed by what they saw, came by the thousands determined to stand between the Water Protectors and police in defense of the rights for non-violent expression of resistance. The book’s powerful photographs by John Willis are complimented by many Lakota voices and those of other allies through interviews, poetry, Lakota artwork, music through a downloadable CD, and historical ephemera. And essays by Terry Tempest Williams and Shaunna Oteka-McCovey provide new insights into age-old problems facing native people.

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Plains Indian ledger art grew out of the Native tradition of recording and chronicling through art important exploits by warriors and chiefs, among them images of war and hunting, that would adorn tipis and animal hides. These were seen as historical markers. But Native life on the Great Plains underwent tremendous change following the American Civil War, when the American conquest of the West was in full gear. In just a few decades, access to the hides of diminishing herds of bison, deer, antelope, and elk became more difficult and eventually impossible with reservation life. Native people creatively turned to the easily available ledger books of settlers, traders, and military men as their new canvases. The ledger art drawings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are revered today for their depiction of Native life during the difficult transition to life on the reservation. The ledger drawings thus became a singularly important way for Native artists to preserve tribal history and to serve as a new kind of personal socio-political expression. Dwayne Wilcox, who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation and is a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation, became interested in ledger art at an early age. He was influenced by the work of Lakota ledger artists such as Amos Bad Heart Bull (1869-1913), but he always sought to defy stereotypical notions of Native life and history and create his own artistic vision. Dwayne eventually focused on humor as his way to comment on the objectification of Native Americans. Skilled as an artist beyond measure, Dwayne’s ledger art drawings win major prizes and are sought by museums and collectors who see in him a true artist. Visual/Language is Dwayne’s first book, and it was created as a collaborative effort with curator Karen Miller Nearburg, who provides an enlightening introduction to his work. This book will surely penetrate the heart and soul and mind of all who read it.

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On June 6, 1912, among the Katmai volcanoes and its resident native people, an unforgettable natural event occurred: the largest volcanic eruption on Earth during the twentieth century. In size comparable to Indonesia's Krakatau in 1883 and Tambora in 1815, one must go back 2,000 years to the north island of New Zealand to find as large a release of rhyolite magma. The actual eruption took place about 100 miles west of Kodiak in the Aleutian Range on the Alaskan Peninsula. In three days, a new volcano—Novarupta—was born. More than five cubic miles of ash and debris flew into the atmosphere, with heavier deposits filling an adjacent forty-four-square-mile valley in depths up to 1,000 feet. The dense, superheated waves of magmatic spray incinerated all living organisms, leaving a hot bed of igneous material that, when mixed with water from the surrounding glaciers and snowfields, produced tens of thousands of steam vents known as fumaroles. Thus was born the Valley of 10,000 Smokes. Native villages, some thousands of years old, were abandoned and never reestablished. The eruption was of such consequence that the National Geographic Society sent Robert F. Griggs to direct a four-year expedition to the site. Griggs and his party recorded their scientific expedition in stunning black-and-white photographs and moving text, which led to the publication of a 50-page article in National Geographic Magazine in 1918 and a subsequent book issued by the Society in 1922 that remains available today. Gary Freeburg has traveled to the Valley of 10,000 Smokes five times, from 2000 to 2011, in pursuit of rephotography of the contemporary landscape and the larger experience of wilderness. Although the fumaroles that Griggs so vividly portrays in words and pictures are largely gone, and that element of visual and volcanic activity has largely ceased, in Freeburg's photographs one can still feel the steam-filled air, sense the deafening noise of the eruption, and grasp the incredible physical forces that created this alluring landscape. Now preserved as part of the 4.7-million-acre Katmai National Park and Preserve, the Valley of 10,000 Smokes continues to inspire—not just esteemed volcanologists such as John Eichelberger and expert cultural anthropologists such as Jeanne Schaaf, but great artists such as Gary Freeburg who seek out the Alaskan sublime, as it is revealed in one of Earth's most remote, raw, and wild places. (See the publisher's website for further information on exhibits, book signings, and to view a slide show: http://gftbooks.com/books_Freeburg.html ).

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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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Landfill is a collection of eye-opening photographs by Brett Kallusky, taken in California's historic Santa Maria Valley, one of the world’s great wine-growing areas. This body of work, however, directs our attention to a small section of the landscape: to the entwined systems of vast agricultural production and the waste it creates. The photographs reveal scenes that are literally hidden from public view and knowledge, underscoring their nature as evidentiary documentation: a microcosm with ramifications far beyond its geographical boundaries. Kallusky's interest does not end there, for his depiction of this famous Central California landscape creates an opportunity for contemplative reflection of our complicit involvement, if only by eating the strawberries, carrots, and cauliflower that is grown here and transported to grocery stores throughout the U.S. Thus, despite the cool formalism and detached documentary style of the pictures, assembled together as they are in this book, they engage in an extended consideration, drawing viewers into a new relationship with this place. Addressing the current, human-centered epoch known as the Anthropocene, the quiet but powerful imagery of Kallusky's Landfill examines important questions of how the land is used and regarded. The landscape reveals who we are, as he brings these invisible spaces into visibility, showing how the earth supports our food needs on a massive scale, fueling a massive engine of consumption. What is left in the wake of that system to which we all belong?

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Human beings in the 21st century hunger, often unconsciously, for places to live that are more than efficient, economical machines. Inhabiting the Sacred offers sound and innovative guidance to both citizens and planning professionals who seek to transform public spaces into sites that answer not only practical needs but spiritual and humanitarian needs as well. The book explains how to give form in everyday landscapes to our most deeply held values and most ennobling purposes, thus turning profane spaces into sacred places.This transformation may be accomplished in interior and exterior private and civic spaces alike. Complex projects may require the assistance of a professional designer and planner, but many projects can be carried out by the individual or family. The processes and techniques described in these pages may even assist indigenous people or other groups in defending territories crucial to their cultural survival. To shape neighborhood and civic space into sacred place requires a partnership between citizens, government and public officials, planners and designers; this book is a resource for all who play these various roles in their communities.The book is organized as a practical guide to creating more meaningful and fulfilling habitation that harmonizes with local culture and personal experiences. Each chapter provides theory, case studies, and how-to techniques aggregated from nearly fifty years of research and practice of embedding values into public landscapes.

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America’s True Colors is an exploration - from coast to coast - of who we are as Americans. Stephen Marc’s magical photographs capture American identity and sense of place like no other artist has, from the perspective of a baby-boomer generation African American documentary/street photographer raised in the Midwest. His book is a record of the collective American community in 2020, in all kinds of places; from public gatherings at special events to commemorations, parades, and protests, to everyday encounters in city streets. Marc shows the rich gestures of a new American culture that are performed, displayed, and exchanged every day, representing hot issues such as immigration, gender identity, civil and women’s rights, cultural diversity, patriotism, community and police violence, sports and play, and popular culture.As the United States becomes more demographically and culturally diverse; Americans simultaneously celebrate and are haunted by the nation’s past. This is a critical period of social-media distractions and political divisions reminiscent of the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, and Marc’s photos straddle the presidencies of Barrack Obama and Donald Trump. Americans are witnessing a significant readjustment in how they define themselves and recognize each other as Americans; and those in search of the “American Dream” today have to be prepared for the contradictions.It has been decades since photographers Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Garry Winogrand, and others made big trips and depicted a nation undergoing great change in their time. America’s True Colors presents a similar journey: It is at once an homage, update, critical response, and expanded vision of those earlier pioneering projects. By comparison, as an African-American man, Marc’s perspective and relationship to the nation’s fabric is very different; his photos show how there has been a major shift in how Americans both acknowledge and refute, embrace and reject the emerging diversity. As Marc suggests, America may not have reached the “post-racial era” that many people have hoped for, as the nation navigates the conundrums of coexistence.In its nearly 250-year history, the United States of America has experienced many defining moments, challenged both from within and outside its borders. This is another of those times, when an imperial president and a dysfunctional two-party system have left the nation at odds with itself. It has yet to be determined how Americans will square the lived reality of its citizens and its foundational principles and ideals. Marc’s stunning portrait of who we are as Americans contains 250 photographs in advance recognition of America’s 250th birthday in 2026.

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Much of the American South, especially its small towns and rural areas, is connected not by interstate highways but through a web-like network of country roads, many of which appear only on the most detailed of maps. These are the backroads that most Southerners drive on every day. Unlike the interstates, whose roadsides have been largely scrubbed clean of regional character, these smaller roads travel through unplanned, vernacular landscapes that tell much about local life, both past and present, and suggest that we make connections between the two.David Wharton has been traveling throughout the American South since 1999, resulting in his first two books - Small Town South (2012) and The Power of Belief: Spiritual Landscapes from the Rural South (2016). As he journeyed, he often paused to make pictures of hamlets and the countryside he was driving through that did not fit the themes of those earlier books. These are scenes that speak to a sense of wonderment, or curiosity, about how those landscapes came to be and how they reflect a complex past with a modern-day world in which the urban competes with the rural in nearly every way.In Roadside South, the third book in Wharton's magical Trilogy of the American South, the photographer captures the quirky and the humorous, the sometimes sad and sometimes ironic scenes that are commonplace along the local, county, and state roads of the South. No artist has revealed the on-the-ground truth of the South as Wharton has, giving rise to a new understanding of and appreciation for a distinctive regional culture that all too frequently, and sometimes mistakenly, is imagined as a bastion of rural and small-town virtue.

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Tidal Rhythms: Change and Resilience at the Edge of the Sea is a collaborative effort by photographer Stephen Strom and award-winning essayist Barbara Hurd. Strom’s images, taken along beaches in the Gulf of California and the Northern California and Oregon coasts, document a world teeming with ancient life-forms, clinging to rocks and finding nourishment but revealed for only a few hours before the tidal waters return. The primitive flora and fauna together create transient marine landscapes whose complex patterns resonate with what we humans perceive as beauty. Following the rhythms of Strom’s images as they travel between intimate portraits and expansive vistas, Hurd’s lyrical and philosophical essays both continue and complicate those cadences as she explores not just resonance, but also disturbance. As artist and writer move us from high tide to low tide and from the panoramic to the minuscule and back again, the reader is confronted with the larger issues of what happens as the seas rises, warms, and acidifies. Tidal zones are one of the first landscapes to be threatened—almost invisibly—by global climate change. Mussels, barnacles, and tidal pools are flung and ruffled or warmed and acidified in ways that stress the lives of those who live there. Shells begin to thin, species migrate north, and habitats literally disappear, yet few people are even aware of these amazing environments. Change, of course, is part of an ancient pattern. For billions of years, the sea has risen and fallen, and life-forms have managed to adapt or not. But the current pace of change confronts us with a new and urgent question: Can the long-established but delicately balanced worlds between tidelines evolve rapidly enough to enable continued sustenance and maybe even a new beauty? In Tidal Rhythms, we are given the gift of a new world-view.

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From 1951 to 1969, John Brinckerhoff (J. B.) Jackson founded, edited, and published Landscape, a magazine that changed the way scholars, writers, teachers, designers, planners, and artists came to understand the everyday places that surround us and influence us in fundamental ways. Then, as a lecturer at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, Jackson further pioneered ""landscape studies,"" a field through which he continues to inspire those who study and interpret landscapes, whether urban, rural, suburban, social, or wild. Drawn to Landscape is the first book to present fully the many aspects of Jackson's career. Including original essays by those who not only knew him best but who have carried his torch to new heights in their own respective work, the book sheds valuable light on Jackson’s life and oeuvre, from the time of his childhood to his death in 1996, as well as on his many legacies that remain today. Also included, some pieces reproduced for the first time, is a wide-ranging display of Jackson's original drawings, watercolors, and teaching slides. J. B. Jackson taught us to pay attention to the often overlooked but defining features of our landscapes, such as the road and commercial strip, the garage and backyard, and flea markets and borderlands, as well as changing recreational uses of the land, the necessity for ruins and the inherent artificiality of historic preservation, and the importance of the clock--as opposed to the geographical and spiritual grounding of indigenous cultures--in defining our communities, societies, and economies. The book will be a welcome addition to anyone seeking, as Jackson urged, to ""read the landscape"" in order to understand our everyday world in new and enlightened ways.

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Old houses may not be haunted, but they retain many palpable vestiges of their pasts. And when Margot Anne Kelley and her husband, Rob, moved into an old farmhouse, they inherited that past as well as the property. On their one acre on Maine's mid-coast, they learned much about the history of their home not by visiting the local historical society but by spending time observing the trees, plants, and grasses that had been planted by those who once owned their land. What they discovered is a landscape history that harkens deep into New England's past. In this field guide to other people's trees, we learn about some of those past owners and their trees. Guided by Kelley's evocative text and gorgeous photographs, we come to appreciate the same lessons that she did—that plants carry the past into the present, that we are part of a rich and interconnected world. In sharing her property with us, Kelley gives us a glimpse of her unique part of New England, encouraging us by her own example to imagine the many gifts we, too, inherit with a house and plot of land. Intimate and informative, Kelley's field guide is a joy to read and a gift to all who share her love of nature and of place. Like the plants that define her land in Maine, this book invites readers to recognize that we can be fully grounded in our home place.

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Throughout the world, the American West has defined the character of the United States of America as no other region in America ever could. The combination of awe-inspiring topography and landscapes, from the 100th meridian to the Pacific Coast, along with the integration of Indian and Hispanic cultures into the American fabric of life have long inspired citizens of the world to travel to and explore the vast lands that define the American West, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present time. Photography helped to open up the West after the American Civil War by sharing views of nature unparalleled in any other place on Earth. And photography helped to create the beginning of a national park system that may well go down in history as America's greatest democratic ideal. It is no wonder that public lands have come to dominate the American West, from national parks to national grasslands and wildlife refuges, from national forests to national monuments and historical sites, from wild and scenic rivers to other sanctuaries of wilderness. Willy Sutton has spent much of the past thirty years getting out of his truck and into the landscape, taking his camera to places of natural wonder both well known and obscure. He has assembled one of the great photographic bodies of work dealing with the public lands of the American West, providing a glimpse of what these landscapes looked like before they were designated as national treasures. But, of course, because of their preservation, they are available to all citizens of the world today. Whether one has lived in or visited the West for an entire lifetime, or whether one is coming to the West for the very first time, all readers of this book will find in Sutton's photographs a magisterial guide to what makes the West so unique, so special. As essayists Toby Jurovics and Susan B. Moldenhauer make plain, Willy Sutton's photographs, as represented in this book, will long be held in esteem for the pioneering work they embody, even in this contemporary age dominated by urban development, social and economic inequality, and climate change. At Home in the West:The Lure of Public Land is a book for the ages.

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Families come in all sizes, shapes, and traditions, each a unique variation of a universal human theme. Whether one comes from a heterosexual, single-sex, or one-parent home, stability and love are paramount. Unfortunately, in the United States, the absence of fathers from their children’s lives has become a real problem. In fact, the Brookings Institute has identified absentee fathers as America's most pressing problem—greater than the economy, education, the environment, health care, infrastructure, you name it. Why? Because nearly every social ill finds an umbrella, a home if you will, in the fatherless home. Choosing Fatherhood: America's Second Chance is meant to explore this issue as no previous book has. And it does so through the art of photography, in which Lewis Kostiner makes portraits of dads who are involved in their children's lives. The book is also accompanied by essays written by leading authorities on the subject: Juan Williams of FOX News, David Travis who was Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago for more than thirty-five years, sociologist Shipra Parikh at Loyola University in Chicago, sociologist Derrick M. Bryan at the Morehouse College, and Roland Warren, former director of the National Fatherhood Initiative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to enhancing fatherhood in America, who also served on President Obama's task force on fatherless homes. Getting fathers to be more involved in their children’s lives is of paramount importance, if the United States is to regain ground as an international leader. Right now, the statistics look grim: forty years ago only eleven percent of America's children lived in homes without fathers, but today more than a third do. This translates into high poverty rates, high drop-out rates in high school, high rates of incarceration, multiple behavioral problems, and the list goes on. As President Obama has declared, fatherhood does not begin with the ecstasy of conception but with the beauty of childbirth and the responsibilities that come with creating and caring for a human life. Although changes in custody rulings and other policy remedies are possible, behavioral patterns are often outside the reach of policy. Choosing Fatherhood offers a hopeful direction that America does have a second chance at correcting a troubling trend, but time is slipping, and awareness of the problem is an important start. (See the publishers website for further information about events and a slide show from the book: http://gftbooks.com/books_Kostiner.html ) Go here to see an interview with the photographer Lewis Kostiner and Juan Williams who wrote the introduction: http://video.foxnews.com/v/2197946608001/

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Since 1983 David Wharton has photographed the twelve states that define the American South, focusing his attention on rural and small-town culture, vernacular architecture and landscape, the role of religion in Southern life, and the relationship between Southerners, their natural surroundings, and the communities they have built. Small Town South is the result of Wharton's travels through a region that extends from Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas in the west to Virginia and the Carolinas in the east, from Kentucky and Tennessee in the north to Florida in the south, with Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia forming the region's center in between. No other photographer has devoted so much time and attention to recording this distinctive American place. The 115 duotone photographs which serve as the book's core, combined with the author's insightful text, convey an overall sense of what the small Southern town has become and looks like during the early twenty-first century. Wharton organizes his study into thematic portfolios that address themes such as the intersection of tradition and modernity, local commemorations of the past, the omnipresence of the church in town life, the difficulties of making a living in the New World economy, the look of Main Street, the display of public murals and memorials, and the iconographic unfolding of community values. Many have likened Wharton's photographic eye and approach to the work of other photographic masters of the South, including Walker Evans, Eudora Welty, William Christenberry, Shelby Lee Adams, Alex Harris, Rob Amberg, and Martha A. Strawn. And, just as we turn to those artists to help us understand and reckon with Southern history and culture, we now can look to David Wharton as another pioneer photographer of the Southern small town in all its simplicity and complexity. (See the publisher's website for further information: http://gftbooks.com/books_Wharton.html ).

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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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