George F ThompsonBirlinn Publishing
Roadside South
Oceano
David Wharton Steve Yarbrough
An Elegy for the Earth
Travels across the Roof of the World
David Ulrich
A Himalayan Memoir
$50 • Hardback • 156 pages • 12x9 78 duotone photographs and 13 color photographs • May 2022 • PHO023040 978-1-93-808692-2 David Ulrich lives in Honolulu, HI
Anne Frej William Frej
$50 • Hardback • 184 pages • 11x9 130 duotone photographs • February 2022 PHO023040 • 978-1-93-808682-3 David Wharton lives in Oxford, MS
Much of the American South, especially its small towns and rural areas, is connected not by interstate highways but through a web-like network of country roads, many of which appear only on the most detailed of maps. These are the backroads that most Southerners drive on every day. Unlike the interstates, whose roadsides have been largely scrubbed clean of regional character, these smaller roads travel through unplanned, vernacular landscapes that tell much about local life, both past and present, and suggest that we make connections between the two. David Wharton has been traveling throughout the American South since 1999, resulting in his first two books — Small Town South (2012) and The Power of Belief: Spiritual Landscapes from the Rural South (2016). As he journeyed, he often paused to make pictures of hamlets and the countryside he was driving through that did not fit the themes of those earlier books. These are scenes that speak to a sense of wonderment, or curiosity, about how those landscapes came to be and how they reflect a complex past with a modern-day world in which the urban competes with the rural in nearly every way. In Roadside South, the third book in Wharton’s magical Trilogy of the American South, the photographer captures the quirky and the humorous, the sometimes sad and sometimes ironic scenes that are commonplace along the local, county, and state roads of the South. No artist has revealed the on-the-ground truth of the South as Wharton has, giving rise to a new understanding of and appreciation for a distinctive regional culture that all too frequently, and sometimes mistakenly, is imagined as a bastion of rural and small-town virtue.
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Climate change is the great existential reality of our time. How we approach this crisis will affect life on Earth for all present and future generations. In spite of our collective ideals, irreversible damage to the environment is imminent and represents both an urgent local and global concern. Through photographs of an acutely endangered landscape, Oceano: An Elegy for the Earth explores the deep paradox between the devout, powerful presence of nature and environmental loss and damage. Extending eighteen miles along Central California’s famed coastline and divided into both a natural preserve and a state vehicular recreation area, the Oceano Dune complex has long fascinated photographers and artists such as Edward and Brett Weston and Ansel Adams. The ephemeral, ever-changing landscape here expresses a sublime order and reflects the many correlations between the land and the dynamics of human society. Using metaphors that inspire hope and explore impermanence and darkness contrasted with the purity of suffusing light, Ulrich’s photographs have been likened to Mark Rothko’s “silence and solitude” that express the resonance and subtle dimensions of consciousness. The coastal environment of the Oceano Dunes is tempered by multiple threats such as incessant motorized activity, the toxicity of surrounding industrial-scale agriculture, and the second-worst air quality in the nation. Thus, for the title and sequence of the images, the photographer employs the literary form of an elegy, an extended reflection and lamentation on Earth during the twenty first century.
$55 • Hardback • 276 pages • 12x10 220 color photographs, 18 line-art maps, 1 fullspread map • July 2022 • PHO019000 978-1-93-808693-9 Anne Frej lives in Santa Fe, NM
Travels across the Roof of the World provides a sweeping yet intimate view of the breathtaking peaks, splendid valleys, and extraordinary people of this vast region, from the Pamir Mountains in Kyrgyzstan through Afghanistan’s fabled Hindu Kush, the Karakoram in Pakistan, and the Great Himalaya Range that stretches across northern India, Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan. Unique in scope among photo books on the Himalaya, Travels across the Roof of the World chronicles William and Anne Frej’s more than twenty pilgrimages throughout the area spanning forty years and 3,000 miles through some of the world’s most remote and difficult-to-reach country. Inspired by the devotion to the practice of Tibetan Buddhism they encountered in the villagers they met on their first trek to Nepal in 1981, they set out on a quest to document Asia’s highest peaks as well as the lives of the resilient people living in these remote mountain communities. When they began, trekkers from the West through these regions were few. Even now, trips are demanding––but not nearly as harsh as the daily lives of the residents, who continue to exist in a kind of stunning isolation that has allowed them to maintain the rich cultural traditions and spiritual practices that have sustained them over many centuries. Edwin Bernbaum’s essay adds to the depth of the pictures, with his focus on the symbolism, religious importance, and associated legends of these sacred places. The authors also share extensive vignettes about the places they saw and how they have changed over time.
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