BOOKS: 1970s & 1980s — BIGGER BOOKS
photographs by Stephen Trimble and Harvey Lloyd
words by the Indian Peoples of the Southwest
(Northland Publishing, 1986)
Awards: 1987 Prisma Award for Editorial Photography
Purchase: AbeBooks, Powell's, Amazon
About:
For twenty-five years, the audio-visual presentation, Our Voices, Our Land, has captured the hearts of visitors to The Heard Museum in Phoenix. This program, an almost overwhelming collage of faces, landscape, and words, brings to life Southwest Indian people. Native Americans have applauded it. To reach a wider audience, the show was distilled by its creators in this book.
The Indian people themselves do the speaking here. These voices come from ten tribes in Arizona and northern New Mexico: elders, teenagers, medicine women, artists, tribal chairmen, teachers—a cross-section of contemporary Indian people of the Southwest. They speak about everything of concern in their lives: the past, the present, and the future. In doing so, they eloquently communicate their complexity, vitality, and grace.
The land is here, too, from Monument Valley to the saguaro cacti of the Sonoran Desert, from the Pueblo villages around Santa Fe to the Grand Canyon. Stephen Trimble and Harvey Lloyd capture the power of the southwestern landscape and the spirit of its native peoples. Faces fill double page spreads. Landscapes span three-panel panoramas, many of them aerial views. Carefully chosen black-and-white historical photos provide contrast and perspective. In short essays, Lloyd describes the genesis of the show and Trimble shares stories from his fieldwork to gather the interviews.
Links:
Extended review, with photographs
Praise:
"Our Voices, Our Land touches the core of Native American language to produce a poetry of infinite expression. The exquisite photographs and text become a language of the heart."
Rain Parrish (Navajo), New Mexico Magazine
"For those whose imaginations have remained untouched by anthropological descriptions of Native American culture, this book may provide the key to a sympathetic understanding."
Almanac
takegreatpictures.com
edited (and with primary photography) by Stephen Trimble
foreword by Edward Abbey
(Gibbs M. Smith/Peregrine Smith Books, 1986)
About:
Photographs from a new generation who came to the canyon country of the Four Corners as park rangers, teachers, river guides, naturalists, and backpackers—for personal fulfillment rather than as artists or commercial photographers. Everything they know about themselves and the land is distilled in these photographs. They transcend the literal. The common thread is light—the magical, iridescent light that happens when clear air, naked rock, and sun collide.
The book pairs thematic portfolios (Rock, Water, Canyons, Mesas, Plateaus, Mountains, and Time) with words from a century of the region's most eloquent writers.
Contributors:
Photographers include Mary Allen, Tom Bean, Michael Collier, Jeff Gnass, Philip Hyde, William Neill, Galen Rowell, John Running, Jeremy Schmidt, Tom Till, Larry Ulrich, and Mark Zarn.
Praise:
"This is far and away the most beautiful book we’ve seen of late. It isn’t just the photographs, which are magnificent, or the text, which is fine, or the typography, which is elegant, or the printing which is as good as it comes, it is the loving care with which the book was put together as a whole."
The Guilfoyle Report
"Be careful—if you live in a city where skies are cluttered with buildings and gray with pollution—you could drown in the pure beauty of this book."
Rocky Mountain News
Trail and Timberline
"When a book purports to highlight an area as spectacular and subtle as the Colorado Plateau, one expects commensurate photographic and literary grandeur. This book delivers it."
The Bloomsbury Review
"Stephen Trimble has created an anthology of visions where the words of our most talented writers create imagined landscapes for us, only to have them come true with every photograph."
Brooke Williams, Wasatch Sports Guide
"The images in this book of photographs are selected with care and precision, each one popping off the page with its own message. This is not a book of cliché photographs to be looked at once and set aside, but a book which can be a new experience each time it is opened. Light is the common thread of the book—glorious and subtle light. But the book’s highest redeeming quality could possibly be the magical intertwining of prose and image."
St. George Magazine
text by Stephen Trimble
photographs by Dewitt Jones
(Graphic Arts Center, 1986)
About:
Stephen Trimble's essay opens this large-format book of Jones's photographs. Steve captures the connection between the people and their homeland in "Voices From the Six Directions," including quotes from interviews with ranchers and homesteaders, river biologists, pioneer traders in Navajo backcountry, archaeologist/explorers, and Ute spiritual leaders. His stories are as revealing as the strata of the canyon walls.
In Canyon Country, say the Navajo, Father Sky meets Mother Earth; here the two match in scale. They complement one another. A similar statement applies to the photographs and words in this book. They come together in balance—a balance celebrated each day in the Navajo prayer that ends “From all around me beauty has been restored.”
(an abridged 80-page version of the book was published in 1990 as Portrait of Canyon Country)
Links:
Dewitt Jones website
Praise:
"A beautiful, evocative book on the Great Places."
Vacation Book Review
"I can almost feel the chill morning air at Bryce Canyon, the heat in Zion, and the dust in Canyonlands. Stephen Trimble is one of the finest of the younger Western author/naturalists. As with Jones and his photographs, Trimble has a manner of expression that evokes nostalgia with every page. This beautiful book is one of the finest coffee table books I have ever seen."
Vacation Book Review
words and photographs by Stephen Trimble
(Rocky Mountain Nature Association, 1984)
Purchase: AbeBooks, Powell's, Amazon
About:
Highest point in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park, Longs Peak has the most interesting history of any western mountain. From its "discovery" by Major Stephen Long in 1820, to the first recorded ascent by John Wesley Powell in 1868, to a twentieth century filled with mountaineering feats, the story of Longs Peak shines with rejuvenating spirit and fascinating fact. At 14,255 feet, it rises high above the cities along the base of the Front Range, offering hikers the opportunity for refuge and climbers the challenge of The Diamond.
Trimble's text spans a major sweep of the West: the raising of the Rockies, the great Ice Age, tundra and forest ecology, and a history peopled with some remarkable characters. Isabella Bird summed up Longs Peak over a century ago: she believed it was "much more than a mountain." Trimble proves her right.
Praise:
"Trimble writes with passion and understanding about a subject he obviously loves."
Vacation Book Review
Vacation Book Review
words and photographs by Stephen Trimble
(Museum of Northern Arizona Press, 1979)
Purchase: AbeBooks, Powell's, Amazon
About:
The Colorado Plateau. Red rock country. The canyonlands. A vast desert parkland of almost unbelievable beauty on the bright edge of the world. The Plateau covers 130,000 square miles of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. This great stony fragment of the Southwest harbors our greatest concentration of national parks and wilderness outside Alaska. Its most famous parks—Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, and Mesa Verde—lure visitors from all over the world.
Steve's work in the parks of the Colorado Plateau culminated with The Bright Edge, his "first book with a spine." Since these parks preserve examples of nearly all the region's environments, the book also becomes a guide to the Colorado Plateau itself. The Bright Edge makes clear the interrelationships and continuity of park landscapes rather than simply cataloging their attractions.
Praise:
"Stunning photography. I must say I’m impressed."
Bruce Babbitt
"Lovely pictures, very informed and informative and appreciative text. There isn't anything quite like it: it ties all the parks and monuments into a coherent geographical and historical bundle."
Wallace Stegner
"An introduction to a way of thinking that proposes to do no less than convince you to preserve a rather large segment of western wilderness. Not that you’ll know this when you read it; the message is much too subtle and perceptive. An extraordinary book…some of the best photography and writing that the West has to offer."
Ann Zwinger
Slideshow:
war captain, Tesuque Pueblo feast day dances, New Mexico, from "Our Voices, Our Land"
White Mountain Apache rodeo, Arizona, from "Our Voices, Our Land"
Chasm Meadow, Rocky Mountain National Park, from "Longs Peak"
Hyde's Wall, Escalante wilderness, Utah, from "The Bright Edge" and "Blessed by Light"
moonrise over the Henry Mountains, Capitol Reef, from "The Bright Edge" and "Blessed by Light"
Pueblo Bonito doorways, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, from "Our Voices, Our Land" and "Blessed by Light"
San Francisco Peaks from Wupatki National Monument, Arizona, from "The Bright Edge"