Customer Reviews

Colorado 1870-2000 II

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As a Colorado history buff, I'm a little annoyed at all the hype the media has given the Fielder-Jackson project. The fact of the matter is Fielder's project is in no way original or ground-breaking. Several other photographers have quietly done similar projects over the years. The first that I know of to publish a then-and-now book on Colorado was Robert L. Brown, who published a series of such books in the 1960s. The first person to start work on a then-and-now book in modern times was Grant Collier, who reshot the images of his great-great grandfather, Joseph Collier. Joshua Dinar has also done a book called "Denver: Then & Now" and there have been a number of other regional Colorado books with a similar theme done over the years. Of these books, "Colorado: Yesterday & Today" by Grant Collier is, in my opinion, undoubtedly the best. It is significantly more interesting because he reshot the images of his great-great grandfather. Collier also did the best job of finding the exact spots where the historic photos were taken and he provided a lot more historical text and insight than any of the other modern books. The next best modern book is probably Fielder's "Colorado 1870-2000," in part because of the impressive size of the book. After this, I would put "Denver: Then & Now," followed by "Colorado: 1870-2000 II". I rank this book last because it consists only of the rejects from his first book. So while the book was released in 2005, the modern photos in it were taken back in 1998. The photos in this book were rejected from the first book for a reason. They are not as historically interesting as those in the first book and Fielder didn't do a great job of precisely re-shooting the images. So unless you own all of the other books listed above, I don't see any reason to buy this book. I do also recommend Robert L. Brown's books, but since the "modern" photos in his books were taken in the 1960s, they are obviously a little outdated. But the books provide interesting insight into two past time-periods, and they also provide a lot of historical text on each of the towns in the book.

When I originally saw this book, I was highly interested because I find Colorado to be a beautiful state and photographic history to be a fascinating topic. Unfortunately, many of the retakes are uninteresting (as stated in another review) and are technically lacking (poor choice in time of day, cloud cover, or just flat out blown highlights (I counted eight photographs with blown highlights on a cursory glance through the book)).

On the plus side, the historical images are worth examining -- simply seeing photographs over 130 years old is intriguing, and the descriptions accompanying these photographs give you a sense of just how pioneering a lot of this work was.

I don't own Colorado I, I have a hard time imagining that it would be as disappointing as Colorado II. The historical photographs are beyond reproach, but I can't shake the feeling that Fielder barely gave any compositional consideration to the modern photographs.

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The author did a marvelous job of taking the the old 1870 photos and finding the exact spot on which to take the current ones. The fun part is seeing how much things remain the same over time. This is a great coffee-table book that folks will always enjoy perusing.

For those who enjoyed the first volume, Volume II is a lovely companion book. In an interview, John Fielder explained that he could only put so many photos in the first volume, but going back through the hundreds of pictures that didn't make it in, he realized there were many more that were just as deserving to be published. I'm thrilled to include this book in my collection and highly recommend it for Colorado history lovers.

This item was purchased as a gift for another family member. We already own a copy, purchased from a source other than Amazon.