Photographs of Time and Place
I first saw this book on a clearance shelf at a used bookstore years ago. I picked it up and promptly put it on my own shelf and forgot about it, assuming it was a collection of “pretty” landscape photographs – mountains, forests, wildflowers, maybe a seaside or two. The cover photo didn’t do much for me – so I never bothered to open it.
Fast forward to the day I finally sat down to read it – and it wasn’t any of that. Well, it is a little of that. There are a few by Ansel Adams, along with a breathtaking image of snow-blanketed Alaskan mountains and a spectacular Grand Canyon sunset panorama. But it is much more than that.
More Than Just Photos
The text is written by Ferdinand Protzman – who is not a photographer by trade, but a cultural writer and critic. It has nearly 100 images spanning the period from 1855 to 2001. Many well-known photographers are represented – such as Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Timothy O’Sullivan, Fay Godwin and Sally Mann. But so are lesser-known photographers (at least by me).
Anyone photographing or otherwise depicting the landscape faces the difficult task of turning what they see in the world into a picture.
Only a small number of the included images fit the classic idea of “landscape photographs.” Many seem more photojournalistic, conceptual or industrial still life (one of my favorite styles). But Protzman organizes the images around a series of short essays tracing historical progression of photography. He connects the concepts to each of the selected images in chapters like: No Picture Without People, Steeling Beauty: Industrial Landscapes, Sociopolitical Landscape and Simply Preserving Paradise.
Ferdinand Protzman has written other photography books, often in conjunction with National Geographic. Landscape is a terrific cross-section of 100+ years of photography with thoughtful text about ways to view the images in context with changes in the world. I recommend it – so much so that I went out and found another copy when my dog chewed up the copy from the clearance shelf of the used bookstore.
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