American Places

Fülszöveg

AMERICAN PLACES
photographs by
ELIOT PORTER
Text by Wallace Sterner &Pa^eStegner
Here is a close look at America, with a decidedly personal touch, by seasoned observers of the continent's varied human and natural history. The range is wide, from Maine west to the Pacific Northwest and south to Florida, across the Mississippi, the Plains and the Rocky Mountains through the Canyonlands to California.
American Places, a splendid marriage of text and photographs, was a dozen years in the making. It is graced with eighty-nine dazzling color photographs taken especially for the book by Eliot Porter. Conceived as a unique exploration of North America's human and natural history, it has much to say about how the American people and the American land have interacted—how they have shaped one another—what patterns of life, with what chances of continuity, have arisen out of the confrontations between an unformed society and a virgin continent.
American Places begins with the first... Tovább

Fülszöveg

AMERICAN PLACES
photographs by
ELIOT PORTER
Text by Wallace Sterner &Pa^eStegner
Here is a close look at America, with a decidedly personal touch, by seasoned observers of the continent's varied human and natural history. The range is wide, from Maine west to the Pacific Northwest and south to Florida, across the Mississippi, the Plains and the Rocky Mountains through the Canyonlands to California.
American Places, a splendid marriage of text and photographs, was a dozen years in the making. It is graced with eighty-nine dazzling color photographs taken especially for the book by Eliot Porter. Conceived as a unique exploration of North America's human and natural history, it has much to say about how the American people and the American land have interacted—how they have shaped one another—what patterns of life, with what chances of continuity, have arisen out of the confrontations between an unformed society and a virgin continent.
American Places begins with the first impressions, in their own words, of the early explorers and settlers of the continent and ends today—almost five hundred years later. Along the way it evokes the sights, sounds, and people of this diverse land to reveal why America has had a powerful hold on the imagination—first of the European explorers and then of generations of immigrants.
Every chapter in the book and every photograph can be considered an illustration of a stage in the process of our adaptation and naturalization.
Some American places—the Maine coast, Utah's Colorado Plateau, to name two—are better understood by Eliot Porter's photographs, unembelUshed by words. Others—Salt Lake and the Mississippi Valley—where several hundred years of human history are lost on today's scene,are better rendered in words. There has been no attempt by photographers or writers to cover exactly the same terrain, or merely to illustrate, in words or pictures, the other's work.
A unique and striking work, American Places will appeal to a broad range of readers: naturalists, conservationists, historians, those who appreciate great photography and good literature—in short, to just about everybody.
Eliot Porter, one of America's best-known photographers, began working with a large-format camera after meeting for the first time with Alfred Stieglitz in the mid-1930s. In 1979 the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented an exhibition of Porter's photographs, the first one-man exhibition by a color photographer ever presented at the Museum.
Wallace Stegner, the distinguished historian, novelist, and teacher, has been awarded both the PuUtzer Prize and the National Book Award. In 1980 he was the first recipient of the Robert Kirsch Award for his contribution to the literature of the American West.
Page Stegner (Wallace Stegner's son) is a Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A novelist and essayist, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981 to write a biography of the poet Robinson Jeffers. Vissza