Images from the Great West [Hardcover]

Alfred Bertram, Jr. Guthrie (Author), Marnie Walker Gaede (Editor)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 133 pages
• Publisher: Chaco Pr; 1st edition (January 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0961601930
• ISBN-13: 978-0961601935
• Product Dimensions: 12.5 x 9.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,166,039 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book of Western photography dedicated to Western writers, August 6, 2003

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Images from the Great West (Hardcover)

Here are almost 100 black and white photographs by Marc Gaede taken 1986-1989 in several Western states, chiefly Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. They are mostly landscapes, and while many are striking images, they're not intended as calendar art. Instead, they are a visual record of mountains, plains, and river valleys with literary and historical associations. There are the sites of massacres and battles: Little Big Horn, Wounded Knee, Sand River, Mountain Meadows, and the Chief Joseph Battlefield. And there are geographical points of reference for anyone who knows the West -- the headwaters of the Missouri River, the Black Hills, the Bighorns, Yellowstone River, the Big Blackfoot River, the Wind River, the Snake River, Independence Rock.

There is very little sign of humans crossing or inhabiting these landscapes. The exceptions are historical traces: petroglyphs of Native Americans, the marks of wagon wheels along the Oregon Trail, an abandoned church on open prairie, an inscription in rock left by "Wm Clark" in 1806.

The book honors Montana novelist A. B. Guthrie, who provides an essay with quotations from several of his books. There's also a brief tribute from Edward Abbey and a foreword by Charles Bowden. The book includes a sequence of photographs of other writers associated with the West: Wallace Stegner, Norman Maclean, Ivan Doig, Thomas McGuane, and James Welch. In an afterword, the photographer, Marc Gaede, tells a hair-raising and finally hilarious story of nearly losing A.B. Guthrie on a misadventure along the Marias River in northern Montana.

This is a great companion volume for readers of Montana literature and history. It portrays the natural environment that has inspired its best loved authors. And in many ways, it captures the land as Lewis and Clark would have seen it almost 200 years ago. For accounts of Chief Joseph and the Mountain Meadow Massacre in Utah, read Timothy Egan's "Lasso the Wind." Another book with many points of connection is "The Big Sky Reader."