I complained a few days ago that Joshua Lutz's otherwise interesting book of photographs of the Jersey Meadowlands didn't provide enough context to allow for complete appreciation. The obverse of this approach is to be found in the most physically beautiful book I have had the good fortune to handle recently,
Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957. Because this volume was undertaken by a university press in collaboration with an art museum and a non-profit archive, and funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, it has a clear educative mission and provides every last bit of context you could possibly want. The text by independent scholars Terry Toedtmeier and John Laursen is extremely informative on Oregon history and photography history, and the title, date, photo type, and current location are given for every photograph. The book introduces the neophyte such as myself to a series of splendid photographers who spent decades chronicling the Columbia River Gorge: Carleton Watkins, Benjamin Gifford, Fred Kiser, Lily White and Sarah Hall Ladd, Arthur Prentiss, George Weister, Clarence Winter, Ray Atkeson and Alfred Monner, and others. It is especially illuminating to compare images of fixed geographic features taken by different photographers at different times in different formats; anyone who doubts that lighting, compositional, and other aesthetic choices make photography as individual in effect as any other art form ought to take a look.
I like all the work here, but I'm especially taken with Ray Atkeson's Kodachromes and with Carleton Watkins's seminal 19th century images, of which
Cape Horn, Near Celilo ("one of the defining photographs of its age") is a gorgeous example:
