On Foot

Robert Adams: Turning Back

A Photographic Journal of Re-Exploration

Published by Fraenkel Gallery/Matthew Marks Gallery.
Photographs by Robert Adams.

Turning Back: A Photographic Journal of Re-Exploration is published to coincide with the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The narrative begins at the Pacific Ocean and moves eastward through what was formerly one of the world's great rain forests. Photographs at the center of the book report on the forest's destruction. Elsewhere they trace a search for hope. Two hundred years ago, Lewis and Clark reported finding in the American Northwest a vast forest of ancient evergreens. In Turning Back Robert Adams looks again at the region's trees, discovering evidence both of America's failure and of a continuing promise. President Jefferson's primary charge to Lewis and Clark was to prepare the way for American commerce. Today, historians still speculate about why, upon his return, Lewis lapsed into depression and apparently committed suicide. “Going east,” Adams suggests, “was more difficult than going west.” So what is the future? Turning Back documents two kinds of predictive evidence. On the one hand we observe the results of greed so unrestrained that they are indistinguishable from those of nihilism. On the other we see what still lives, whether by our design or neglect, or Providence; in these 164 pictures the tone is celebratory, as in a prayer book. From coastal landscapes populated with tourists to timber clear-cutting and small family farms in eastern Oregon, here we reflect on what was lost, what is retained, and what we value both regionally and as a people with a common history.

PUBLISHER
Fraenkel Gallery/Matthew Marks Gallery

BOOK FORMAT
Clothbound, 9.75 x 11.75 in. / 234 pgs / 164 tritone.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 5/15/2005
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2005 p. 10   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781933045016 TRADE
List Price: $65.00 CAD $75.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

Ed Panar: Golden Palms

Published by J&L Books.
Edited by Ed Panar, Jason Fulford. Interview by Charlotte Cotton.

When Ed Panar moved to Los Angeles, he opted not to get a car. Or a high-end camera. For two years. His compact was, "quick, cheap and direct, and that seemed to suit L.A." The color photographs collected in Golden Palms reflect Panar's walking life there, with the cumulative effect of a subtly funny tour through the city's lost back streets--parts of contemporary Los Angeles that most people would simply speed past in their cars. His subjects, including "The 405," "Near Ventura Boulevard," "Tuesday Afternoon," "Summer" and "Coming Home," were often, he says, "like cartoon characters I'd find while I was walking around, like the rainspout attached to the wall, in a city where it doesn't rain." And like that rain spout, many of the images capture especially peculiar intersections of nature and architecture, like a set of gnarled, clawlike tree roots gripping the sidewalk, a squirrel ignoring a trash can next to his tree, or palm trees photographed against stucco walls, looking like Dr. Seussian vegetation straight out of The Lorax. With an interview by the esteemed photo historian and curator, Charlotte Cotton.

PUBLISHER
J&L Books

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 10 x 8 in. / 96 pgs / 56 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 6/1/2007
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2007 p. 48   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780974690865 TRADE
List Price: $30.00 CAD $35.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

Lee Friedlander: Photographs Frederick Law Olmsted Landscapes

Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers.
Text by Lee Friedlander.

A natural chronicler of all things uniquely American, photographer Lee Friedlander here puts his lens to the work of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), designer of many of this country's most iconic public landscapes and the father of North American landscape architecture. Olmsted was responsible for a staggering number of America's greatest parks, including the Niagara reservation (North America's oldest state park), Washington Park, the Biltmore Estate, the U.S. Capitol building landscape and entire parkway systems in Buffalo and Louisville. His most famous work remains New York City's Central Park, a pioneering egalitarian gesture that, at the time, was very unusual for its ready accessibility. This book, published to coincide with The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2008 exhibition, compiles 89 photographs made by Friedlander in Olmsted's public parks and private estates.
This stunning collection of rich tritones celebrates the complex, idiosyncratic picture-making of one of the country's greatest living photographers, and also arrives upon the 150 year anniversary of Olmsted's 1858 design for Central Park. Rambling across bridges and through open meadows and dense undergrowth, Friedlander locates a pure pleasure in Olmsted's designs--in the meticulous stonework, the balance of exposure to shade and in the mature, weather-beaten trees that attest to the durability of Olmsted's vision.

PUBLISHER
D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers

BOOK FORMAT
Clothbound, 13 x 12.75 in. / 84 pgs / 89 tritone.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 2/1/2008
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2008 p. 6   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781933045733 TRADE
List Price: $85.00 CAD $100.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

Olaf Otto Becker: Above Zero

Published by Hatje Cantz.
Text by Dr. Konrad Steffen. Interview by Freddi Langer.

Following Broken Line, a prizewinning portrait of the coast of Greenland, Olaf Otto Becker (born in Travemünde, 1959) turns his attention to the interior of the island in his new series, Above Zero. Second only to Antarctica, Greenland has the largest inland ice surfaces in the world. Becker's spectacular portraits of this region are taken during physically strenuous, sometimes life-threatening treks among glacial crevasses and melting ice floes, with a cumbersome large-format camera. His photo studies draw out the overwhelming beauty of this icy landscape, while documenting their present fragility: dust and rust in the air form black, crusty deposits, which, in conjunction with global warming, accelerate the melting of the ice sheets--with what will probably be inevitable, catastrophic results. Becker warns that even in these uninhabited regions, human actions can have fatal consequences.

PUBLISHER
Hatje Cantz

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 13.5 x 11 in. / 176 pgs / 75 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 1/31/2010
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2009 p. 64   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783775724371 TRADE
List Price: $95.00 CAD $127.50

AVAILABILITY
Not available

Jean Gaumy: D'Après Nature

Published by Editions Xavier Barral.

A student of modern literature, Jean Gaumy started his professional career as a newspaper editor and photographer for a daily newspaper in France. His first publication was L'hôpital (The Hospital, 1976), a stark statement on the French health system. His 1983 study of French prison life was likewise considered pioneering. In 1977 Gaumy joined Magnum and became a full member in 1986. Since then, Gaumy has made both films and photoworks. This beautiful, large-format publication is based upon Gaumy's hikes and climbs in the Occitan Piedmont and the French Pyrenees. Superbly printed in black and white on matte paper stock, Gaumy's photographs detail the pitted mountainscapes of these regions, both up close and from afar, in an austere but luxuriant document of geologic time. The volume closes with excerpts from René Daumal's great mountaineering novel Mount Analogue (1937). D'Après Nature will delight all connoisseurs of the photobook.

PUBLISHER
Editions Xavier Barral

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 15 x 12.25 in. / 108 pgs / 42 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 2/28/2011
Out of stock indefinitely

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2011 p. 99   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9782915173581 TRADE
List Price: $125.00 CAD $170.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

Gerhard Richter: Wald

Published by Walther König, Köln.

Gerhard Richter has been taking photographs in the dense forest near his Cologne home since 2005. This complex artist's book features 285 of these stunning, almost abstract images, sorted loosely into groups--delicate branches, horizontal logs, diagonally growing trees--and interspersed with German text from a forestry magazine, all the words of which have been shuffled by means of a random generator and then edited to remove any overly explicit names or passages--although the resulting absurd text can still be recognized as a commentary on forest issues. Further, Richter divides the text into seven horizontal strips that run through the book, arranged according to strict parameters, which he then undermines so that the 106 variously assigned pages fill continuously with text, and then empty gradually after the only completely filled page in the middle is reached--producing a unique fading in and out of images. In German only.

PUBLISHER
Walther König, Köln

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 6.5 x 9.75 in. / 396 pgs / 285 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 2/1/2009
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2009 p. 139   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783865605030 TRADE
List Price: $85.00 CAD $100.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

Bernhard Fuchs: Roads and Paths

Published by Walther König, Köln.
Essay by Heinz Liesbrock.

Pursuing the Bernd and Hilla Becher tradition of photo-typologies—he was a student of the Bechers—Bernard Fuchs follows his Autos monograph with this catalogue of roads and.paths. These routes all lead somewhere, perhaps away from civilization, but, as Fuchs makes plain, are certainly civilizing entities themselves, the artificial medium by which nature is found.

PUBLISHER
Walther König, Köln

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 9.75 x 11 in. / 120 pgs / 53 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 2/28/2010
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2010 p. 156   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783865606273 TRADE
List Price: $75.00 CAD $90.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available