Northwest Passage: A Photographer's Account of his Twenty-Three Day Journey Through the Perilous Northwest Passage -- From Alaska, Through Canada and the Northwest Territories, to Greenland [Hardcover]

Robert Glenn Ketchum (Photographer), William Simon (Preface), Barry Lopez (Commentary)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 25, 1996

Breathtaking arctic vistas from one of the most celebrated photographers of the natural world.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What can you do with a Pentax and vast amounts of ice and water? If your name is Robert Ketchum, there are no limits, not even the sky. The Northwest Passage, the Waterloo of many accomplished seamen, became the dream--and obsession--of former U.S. Treasury Secretary William Simon, who traversed the elusive and dangerous region in a yacht during the summer of 1994. Ketchum, hired to chronicle the 23-day expedition from Alaska, through Canada and the Northwest Territories to Greenland, produced stunning results; an on-board helicopter enabled him to photograph the terrain as no Arctic image maker before.

From Booklist

For a long time, European explorers sought in vain for an Arctic shortcut to the riches of the Orient. Ships and men vanished. The Franklin Expedition of 1845 is the most famous failure. The Northwest Passage was not successfully traversed until the 1903^-6 expedition of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Ketchum, a great naturalist photographer, and nine others set off on a yacht in 1994, which eventually became (with the aid, on one occasion, of an ice-breaking ship) the fifty-sixth vessel to cross the Northwest Passage. The photography (aerial, island, and yacht shots) transports its viewers to a new and strange world that causes the adventuring heart to beat erratically. In the world's quest for minerals, oil, and gas reserves, in its misuse of the Arctic as a dumping ground, this powerful and majestic region is threatened, and at the close of the book, Ketchum the environmentalist makes those facts known. Yet charting this once mystic realm, in this fashion, is ironic--a siren's song to those watchful for the next frontier to develop. Bonnie Smothers

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Aperture; 1st edition (November 25, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0893816760
• ISBN-13: 978-0893816766
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,775,352 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great but Damaged, April 23, 2004

By 

Howard Mcpherson (Cleveland, Ohio United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Northwest Passage (Hardcover)

I knew that Robert Glenn Ketchum's book The Northwest Passage would be a great book, but I was surprised to see the low price of $9.98. Now I know why. About 5 pages had been double printed with two pages of text on one page. Also a few pages of images had been overprinted. I hope this involves only my copy and not all the others that are being offered.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Etheral photos of ice, snow, the sky and water, December 2, 2001

By 

Oksana (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Northwest Passage: A Photographer's Account of his Twenty-Three Day Journey Through the Perilous Northwest Passage -- From Alaska, Through Canada and the Northwest Territories, to Greenland (Hardcover)

If you're looking for a photography book with 'beautiful, Kodak moment' pictures of wildlife, the Inuit, wild flowers upon the tundra, etc., this is NOT for you. But, if you like "nature" photography at its minimalist best, these photographs are glorious, providing, like me, you enjoy looking at photos of fog upon the water and the patterns that ice floes make upon the land and sea.

I was a tad disappointed in the text... because it's "poetry", as opposed to the photographer detailing his journey. An account of Ketchum's journey is in another part of the book, but it would have been far more effective, if his observations were next to the images, instead of a poet's musings on the area, which left me unsatisfied and with questions about certain images (like where they were, etc.). This is a remote area that we know little about and the photographer's account and observations next to his photographs would have been most helpful and informative.