A Vast and Ancient Wilderness: Images of the Great Basin

Rating:
Summary: Finding Solace In The Emptiness Of A Magical Landscape
Review: I was browsing the book collection in Zion National Park's gift shop one morning when A Vast and Ancient Wilderness caught my eye several aisles from where I stood. The exquisite photograph on the cover of the book beckoned me like a magnet might draw a bit of metal to it. I had just the day before traversed all three hundred plus miles of central Nevada via "the loneliest road in America," state route 50, and was thus newly acquainted with the seductive beauty of basin and range topography. Although my guide book had warned that the drive might seem endlessly monotonous to some, I had the sense that the desolation and emptiness to be encountered would provide a landscape of light, texture and color I would relish. I was correct in this assessment beyond my wildest imagining! Traveling in late November, I was consistently astonished by the beauty of the terrain as subtly variegated Earth tones of black, brown, dark green, ocher and gray accented by the pure white of snow-capped mountains passed before me hour after hour throughout the day. Reminiscent of a series of Rothko paintings seen in ever-changing light, the sun at first highlighted the inherent colors of the land and then rendered them in increasingly intense shades of yellow and red once day evanesced into night. Claude Fiddler's portfolio of images of the Great Basin (as it stretches beyond Nevada into Oregon, Utah and California) represents this remarkable corner of our planet righteously. As John Hart notes in his introduction to Fiddler's work, these "photographs find the textures and the colors where the unpracticed eye might register only vacancy. Spend some time with images like these, and you will never look at emptiness in quite the same way again." In addition to the often sumptuous photography of a rich and varied emptiness, a lively essay by Steve Roper discusses early exploration by miners and trappers of this inhospitable desert to interesting effect.