New Book Discovery

[Richard Boulware]

Not long ago I made a quick run to my local supplier...SAFEWAY, to get some food, and as I pushed my noisy grocery cart along I came upon a large table full of books. Most were for children but one stuck out and I grabbed it, opened it, and was blown away my the pictures.
The book is about 11X12" and about 175 pages of dramatic, beautiful, exciting color landscape photography. Not your typical boring...Kodak Moment kind of stuff. I immediately started flipping through the pages and was totally captivated. My visual preoccupation was suddenly interrupted when a nice old lady accidentally rammed my cart with hers and I was jolted back into reality...at Safeway. I closed the book and turned it over to find a price. On the back jacket was a sticker that said..."U.S.A>$4.99. YEAH, that's right...FIVE BUCKS! I started digging through the huge tub of books for another copy but had no luck. I thought I would pass my impressions along in case someone might be interested.

The title of the book is: "NO BOUNDARIES: Spirit of Adventure"..* I later noticed that the original price of the book as printed on the book jacket is $34.95. Hell, I would have paid that much for it....it is that good.

There is a lot of really fine photography in it, much by Galen Rowell of Mountain Light. The art direction and picture editing is really superb and the printing quality is excellent...all color.

Some purists, some on this forum, might not feel as I do about the photography because many taboos are broken in the imagery of this book. First, it is exciting. Second....it actually shows some scenics where water is flowing over rocks, and some of the shots actually really do look like water...NOT smoke, flowing in a river bed. Third, there are actually people in some of these shots that give scale to the landscapes...and last but not least...most of the shots do actually use foreground, middle ground, and background to aid the composition. AMAZING!

Finally, there is another element that will turn off many purists in LF photography. There are some Ford Motor Company vehicles, well composed into some of the shots. Not many but some.
Seems only natural to me since FORD actually was a major financial contributor to the production of this very fine book. HEY...what a Ford Explorer occasionally in the middle ground or background of a very fine photograph...between friends, RIGHT?

I'm using this book as a text for some of the students I am mentoring. When ever I show this book to new people, I always ask them for their impression of these 175 pages of dramatic pictures. The answer is always the same. "It (book pictures) makes me want to go there"!

What finer proof of successful landscape photography can there be?

Oh, ...I forgot to mention. In the back there are color thumbnails of every shot, with an index of technical information, like picture location. There is also thumbnails and bios on the photographers with their picture.

Some of my friends are searching ABE BOOKS on the web to get used copies.

Try it...I think you just might like it.

* "NO BOUNDARIES: Spirit of Adventure", Color, 175 pages, 10.5 X 11.5", Northword Press, Minnetonka, Minnesota, ISBN 1-55971-825-0, Printed in Korea by Dai Nippon Printing Co. Ltd.

Richard Boulware - Denver.

[Eric Biggerstaff]

Sounds like a nice find! I will head to my local Denver Safeway and see if they have some!

Galen Rowell was a great photographer and we lost a great person when he and his wife were killed in a plane crash ( not sure if you knew that).

Have a great one.

Eric

[John Kasaian]

I'm off to Safeway!

Sounds like a terrific find. I thought I'd hit the Mother Lode when I found John Garrett's The Art of Black And White Photography on a remainder table at Borders for $12.95 but it sounds like Safeway has that beat.

[Antonio Corcuera]

First come, first serve (too expensive for me to ship across the Atlantic!):
ebay Item number: 4590830226

[Richard Boulware]

I just checked ABE BOOKS on the web, and there are a ton of these books available starting at $2.95.

[Hassle Vlad]

Rowell was the Robert Redford of photography: talented, famous, but ultimately destructive of the things he claimed to champion. He produced memorable but formulaic images-- usually of the mountains, in alpenglow, on heavily saturated Fujichrome, and with heavy graduated filters. Thus was the Wonder of Wilderness separated from the reality of human experience, a truly destructive polarity. And this is a problem. (I'm glad there are Fords in those pictures; that is most unusual for Rowell.)

He had little time for black-and-white photography, he scorned big cameras, and he thought the entire darkroom process to be unnecessary. That's pretty dismissive.

As such he is the prime example of the Baby Boomer Photographer. For others, see Art Wolfe and John Fielder. None of them are fit to carry George Tice's equipment.

[Darin Boville]

Hi Davis,

Sounds like you have the beginnings of an essay there--I would love to see the whole thing!

--Darin

www.darinboville.com

[Richard Boulware]

I write this post in response to the 11-16-05 post to this thread by one, Mr. Davis Waite. My message is not one to attack Mr. Waite as a person but to attack his ideas and his attitude which is petty and spiteful to the memory of the late Galen Rowell and an affront to the photographer community in general.

Personally, I had not known of the work of Galen Rowell until I had purchased the book "No Boundaries" which is a a very fine book for advanced as well as beginning photographers of nature or the outdoor scene.

After reading the post of Mr. Davis Waite, I promised myself that I would wait 24 hours before I posted a response, to give my blood pressure a chance to stabilize. I also wanted to again view my personal copy of the PBS production, "Ansel Adams", on VHS. (I enjoyed dinner with Ansel Adams in Honolulu in 1957). I also wanted to take the book in question and review it in detail and in total, as well as separate out, the specific photo work of Galen Rowell for my personal evaluation.

Mr. Rowell's work is the majority of the many contributing photographers presented in this book.
I was not familiar with Galens work until the post of Mr. Waite, but this post prompted me to log on the the "Mountain Light" web site of Galen Rowell and Wife...to review his work. I had not known he was lost in the tragic airplane crash which I believe occurred in South America.

And no, Mr. Waite, the photographic illustrations of Ford automobiles in this book, although small and well executed are not the work of Galen Rowell. (There is only a few in 175 pages.)

Mr. Waite's comments and attitude on the work of the late Galen Rowell are symbolic I think, of a certain mind-set of some photographers who do themselves NO favor by adopting this attitude and position.

The purists elite who speak from some imaginary ivory tower regarding landscape photography believe that they alone carry the torch of the late Ansel Adams. From personal experience and my own common sense I believe they are self-delusional and could not be more wrong. Adams spend many more hours in the darkroom manipulating finished prints from already fixed negatives than he ever spent shooting...as he has confessed.

So what if Galen Rowell as seen by Mr. Waite...(Used) "heavily saturated Fujichrome, and with heavily graduated filters". Rowell is also seen by Mr. Waite as, "separated from the reality of human experience, a truly destructive polarity". SEPARATED FROM WHAT...commercial success or an assignment from National Geographic in which he made hero of the environment!
What artistic psycho-babble, and artistic BS.

So what if Galen Rowell had little time for large format (Ever pack for a mountain climb) or darkroom processing. Does this make him any less a photographer! I think not! "Pretty dismissive"? On the contrary Mr. Waite, I think it is you who are so carelessly dismissive.

For my many friends and colleagues who are professionals, as am I, and who really dare abou the direction photography is taking, your attacks and hollier-than-thou attitude is pretty self-serving and speaks much more about you Mr. Waite, than it does about the late Galen Rowell.

Photographers are story tellers. Some like you Mr. Waite are more concerned with the grammar of the story telling...rather than the last chapter of the book or a fine punch-line to a long joke.
For the rest of us in photography, the proof is in the final print. The end of the process, the completion. The finished product that tests rapport with the viewer or audience. You are hung up on the 'process', or the 'purity of the process', like equipment, cameras, film, et.al.

Today many shoot images which are boring nonsense and are called art (like Tyce) and unable to clearly convey what the photographer was trying to "say"...often, because the photographer didn't have anything to say at all, or the photographers thinking was "FUZZY"...like the great majority of present day landscape photography in LF B&W...which is so incredibly boring! It is the "Emperor's New Clothes Syndrome" with many viewers simply not able to summon the courage to simply view a photograph and honestly say.....I DON'T GET IT!

You're part of the 'Emperor's' cheer leader's Mr. Waite. Clothes or not, ...you will still cheer on.

With respect,

Richard Boulware - Denver

[John_4185]

I'm back.

Davis Waite As such he is the prime example of the Baby Boomer Photographer.

Mr. Waite paints with a wide brush, or more likely with a broom from a bucket. From what generation does he speak? I look forward to his specific justification of his overwhelming damnation of an entire generation. Oh, and perhaps he would do us the favor of defining the Baby Boomer so that whomever is reading this far can understand if he is being spoken of.

[tim atherton]

Baby Boomer = anyone born between 1946 - 1964 - which I would guess is about 85 - 90% of this list?

(where's that "how old are you" thread?)

[tim atherton]

yep - steepest part of your cuve is the BB generation:

http://elearning.winona.edu/age.gif

[John_4185]

timyep - steepest part of your cuve is the BB generation:[/b]

It is as steep and populated below the mean (oh, duh!) :). My heroes are those at the top right. :) 70-somethings.

[tim atherton]

well - 0okay - the longest part of the funny little graph.... :-)

[Scott Fleming]

Does this mean I have to throw out my Galen Rowel 4 stop -soft graduated neutral density filter (custom ordered) I just splurged on from Singh Ray?

[Hassle Vlad]

In response to Mr. Boulware-Denver's comments, I will be brief, since this thread is probably stale by now anyway.

1. I was wrong. Rowell was born in 1940. So he is not a baby boomer. Because he was always in such great physical condition due to his rock-climbing, he looked much younger than his age. I regret the error.

2. Mr. Boulware-Denver and I have clear differences of opinion regarding photography. Also, he is a professional photographer, and I am not. He ate dinner with Ansel Adams, and I did not. All of this is interesting to no one besides ourselves. These differences of opinion are probably best dealt with over a beer or two.

3. Mr. Boulware-Denver claims not to attack me as a person, and then calls me all sorts of funny names and misquotes my original message. I stick to that message: Rowell's work, however beautiful, accomplished, and successful, is fundamentally escapist, and subordinates photography to recreation. I'm sorry if this strikes him as ivory-tower psychobabble.

4. I recommend that Mr. Boulware-Denver read Rowell's _Mountain Light_, which is the standard statement of his photographic vision. He also published a book which is full of portraits of celebrities concerned about Tibet, taken in gorgeous evening light, the sun glinting off of their chiseled faces. I forget the book's title.

[Wayne]

No no no, not so quick. You cant start something and then say "this is stale" and walk away. I for one (and perhaps the only one) would like to hear the full body of your rant. I was never a big fan of Galen Rowell, I found his work superficially "pretty" and lacking in substance. That doesnt mean I want to denigrate him personally or those who admire his work, but a discussion of his photography is certainly fair game. The fact that the highest goal of color landscape photography is to make people say "I want to go there" is a big reason why I dont do it anymore. Everywhere I go, outside of Canada and remotest wilderness, there are already quite enough people there. I can think of few places that really need any more. As such I think it is (more often than not, with exceptions of course) detrimental to the very thing being photographed.

[Richard Boulware]

Mr. Davis Waite's response is even more confusing that his first. A peculiar comment in the second post prompts me to ask this question. Mr. Waite...I'll bet the majority of people on this forum use photography both as an escape from their everyday professions, and do so for recreational purposes. ..or both. What in heavens name is wrong with that? Are those who do this less honorable than you? Please explain.

Perhaps you would enlighten us Mr. Waite. If you don't make photographs in the natural world, to escape the din of traffic noise, telephones and crowds, then why do you do it? And, when you do it, is this not a recreational endeavor for you? Perhaps when you pack your gear you think you are on some heaven-sent mission that simply MUST be done.

Please enlighten us, Mr. Waite. You've really got my curiosity going now.

Why do you make pictures Mr. Waite? ...and do you have some kind of "Mission Statement" that you would like to share with us?

Richard Boulware ......(WHO LIVES IN DENVER, COLORADO)

[Hassle Vlad]

Since at least two people are now interested, here goes; and I apologize to Wayne, who thought I was trying to walk away from the discussion. What follows should drive the rest away.

1. Rowell was a rock-climber first and a photographer second. This is what I meant when I wrote that he subordinated photography to recreation. His breakthrough came in 1973 with the National Geographic story on climbing in Yosemite. He found continued success photographing expeditions in Patagonia and the Himalayas, especially the Karakoram. He took beautiful pictures of beautiful, inhospitable, and inaccessible places. As such, he was a very romantic figure—the rock-climbing, intrepid mountaineer photographer.

2. He took very romantic photographs. Jagged, icy peaks, high mountain valleys sprouting with wildflowers, waterfalls at sunset: all scenes out of the alpine romantic image bank from Caspar David Friedrich to Albert Bierstadt to Ansel Adams. He seemed most concerned aesthetically with light at its most evanescent—alpenglow, rainbows, lenticular clouds, and so on. But although he worked in a very different time than these artists, you would never know it from his photographs (other than knowing that Kodachrome had been invented); and I have a problem with this, a problem well articulated by Robert Adams. Where is the human element, the human presence, the historical context and change, and the painful and poignant ruin of a place? Rowell made the romantic decision to avoid these questions, and he is the lesser photographer for it. George Tice confronted these questions, and is the greater for it.

3. Rowell’s advocacy of environmental causes is admirable, but I think the jury remains out regarding the environmental impact of his photographs. I suspect it has been negative, just as Redford’s bad film of MacLean’s good book, “A River Runs Through It,” has ruined fishing in the west. So what if thousands of copies of Rowell’s books grace the coffee tables of suburban great rooms from Thornton to Highlands Ranch; taking pictures of wild places, and then publishing them to the world, is not necessarily an environmentally responsible thing. 5000 rock climbers using chocks is more destructive than 500 using pitons, just as 5000 fishermen practicing catch-and-decease is more destructive than 500 fishermen limiting out. Make a hero out of the wilderness—or rather, a jungle gym out of it—and millions of flush baby-boomers will flock to it in their SUV’s, eager to slay it and buy condominiums nearby.

4. Basic advice Rowell gave to his students: crop out the foreground in your work. Compare this with David Plowden, who wrote that the foreground was the biggest challenge a photographer faced. In other words, Rowell advised to eliminate the space that separates the photographer from “the scene”: this strikes me as more escapism. See Rowell’s photograph of Maroon Lake and the Maroon Bells: a Kodachrome duplicate of Ansel Adams’s picture from 40 years earlier. Except by the time Rowell took his version, there was a parking lot in the foreground.

5. Rowell defended the Kodachrome process at length in _Mountain Light_, arguing that this process was more, not less, artistic than photography that required the photographer’s involvement in darkroom processes, because it forced the photographer to complete his vision at the exposure stage. This is a perfectly respectable opinion, and seems similar enough to those of Cartier-Bresson and other greats. It is also, again, romantic: the artist as genius, accomplishing the work in one fell stroke, rather than the artist as artisan, doing the drudgery over time to create the work. But later in his career, Rowell fully embraced digital scanning and printing, praising the results of labor-intensive electronic image manipulation. I find this inconsistency to be remarkable. Did his late embrace of the digital darkroom rehabilitate in his mind the wet darkroom as well? I don’t know. But Rowell was pretty dismissive of the darkroom; see _Mountain Light._

6. Since I am an ivory-tower psychobabbler, let me further irritate Mr. Boulware by closing with a name-dropping analogy from philosophy, of which I know very little. Kierkegaard, the existentialist Christian philosopher, complained that G.W.F. Hegel, the great German idealist philosopher, had solved all sorts of enormous philosophical questions (progress in history, phenomenology, Napoleon, etc.), but that he had not helped Kierkegaard to understand what it was like to live as a man in this world, to feel pain, to suffer, and to die. In short, Kierkegaard’s complaint was that Hegel was simply not concerned with basic human questions. I have a similar complaint with the photography of Rowell, Wolfe, Fielder, and their ilk: romantic, pure, and idealistic visions do little when they are removed from the human world, especially when the world is going to hell largely as a result of our escapism. We have known this since at least World War I.

In short, I find Rowell’s romanticism, however lovely, to be escapist at best and dishonest at worst. That dishonesty makes him a lesser photographer. While I envy his success and his fame as a climber-photographer—who would not?—I disagree with his dismissal of black-and-white photography, of traditional darkroom processes, and of the fine print. And I regret his impact on the American West.

[Brian Sims]

Sounds like pinnacle envy.

[Richard Boulware]

Mr. Waite: Thank you for that rather long, but thought provoking post. Perhaps we can actually make an interesting dialogue out of this exchange after all.

I will study your response carefully, and wait about 24 hours to post my thoughts.

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

Happy Thanksgiving Mr. Waite,..... and to all.

Richard Boulware

[Richard Boulware]

Mr. Waite: On the day after Thanksgiving I earnestly wrote about 300 words in response to your last post. After re-reading it for about the forth time, I have come to the conclusion that having a reasonable dialogue with you would be impossible.

Why is that you ask? Simply this. Your ideas and your credibility just went into the trash bin when you made that comment on how the film "A River Runs Through It"..."ruined fishing in the west". I think this comment is symbolic of your other ideas in this thread. It's NUT'S!

Being an avid fly fisherman, and owning an Avon river raft and almost a dozen Winston and Sage fly rods, I can say with confidence that fishing in the west has never been better in Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. Two of my Montana photography students read your comment, and after they finished laughing, I finally decided to just end this madness in attempting to reply to your whacko ideas. That fishing comment scuttled your credibility Mr. Waite. I'll bring a copy of your post to the next Trout Unlimited meeting next month. I'm sure my fishing buddies will enjoy it.

Rave on Mr. Waite....Hell ain't half full, yet!

This thread is over and dead....like your ideas.

[Hassle Vlad]

QED.

[QT Luong]

Mr Waite has articulated his ideas in a fairly detailed posting where he demonstrates some familiarity about Galen Rowell's work and writings, and makes some interesting general philosophical points. To dismiss all his ideas as "nuts" and "dead" because of one illustrative example he uses, however wrong it seems to you, sounds to me somehow cavalier, especially on the part of someone who has just discovered Galen Rowell's work. As someone who owns many volumes of Galen Rowell's books, I can tell you that indeed his tone in writing about big cameras has always irritated me.

[Oren Grad]

Sorry QT, but what grates most about Mr. Waite's screed is that it drips with condescension and disdain for someone else's approach to photography because it doesn't conform to his arbitrary and narrow view of the medium's purpose.

It's also got more than a whiff of a sentiment I find really irritating in Adams' writing as well, that the masses should know their place, and stay away from the glorious wilderness so that his superior esthetic and philosophical sensibilities won't get bruised. That his equally pretentious elevation of "the human element, the human presence, the historical context and change, and the painful and poignant ruin of a place" to a moral principle of photography renders the whole argument incoherent makes the accusation of dishonesty on Rowell's part all the richer.

The nonsense about composition is yet another instance of overblown theory running away from reality. Plowden's a fine photographer, but just because he said something that sounds deep doesn't mean it is. The most obvious difference between Rowell and Plowden is that one shot 35mm, and the other primarily 6x6. Did you ever wonder why Hassy shooters worry about foregrounds? Did you ever try shooting in a square format? D'oh...

No, I'm not a Rowell fan - in fact, LF B&W contact prints are more my thing. But he did what he wanted to do with his photography and his life. More power to him. On the other hand, if he, too, was intent on building elaborate structures of philosophical hot air to justify an intense disdain for ways of exploring the world photographically that were different from his own, then he and Mr. Waite deserve each other.

[William Mortensen]

I'd ignored this thread after the first few posts, thinking it was just comparisons of finds on bargain book tables. Looking in today, I found the critical analysis of Rowell's work quite interesting, and Davis Waite's argument on the matter articulate and well-read. It is sad that these arguments sometimes turn personal; this was one of the more clearly stated and detailed philosophical takes on two major and, perhaps, opposing approaches to photography.

Mr. Waite, I hope to have the privledge of arguing with you over some aesthetic issue myself someday!