Outside magazine, December 1998

Books: The Big Picture

The Seventh Generation: Images of the Lakota Today, photographs and interviews by Katrin Freisager (powerHouse Books, $45). A bareback gallop through the history and current state of the Lakota Sioux Nation, this volume takes its title from a 19th-century prophecy that, after seven generations of war and struggle, the Lakota will return to greatness. Swiss photographer Katrin Freisager spent three years documenting life on the Pine Ridge, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock Reservations. Her gritty, duotone portraits, hauntingly bleak landscapes, and revealing interviews draw us into the world of young girls, tattooed men, and rodeo cowboys upon whose shoulders the prophecy's outcome rests.
Available at Amazon.com

Photo: Grannis — Surfing's Golden Age, 1960-1969, edited by Brad Barrett (The Surfer's Journal, $60). When big-wave enthusiast LeRoy Grannis was diagnosed with an ulcer in 1960, he took up photographing other surfers near his Los Angeles home as a way to relax. It wasn't long before surfing magazines began running a simple — and soon legendary — credit line alongside his crisply framed scenes: "Photo: Grannis." This collection of 300 of his finest shots, taken during the sport's halcyon decade, freeze-frames a lost era. Fresh-scrubbed surfers ride longboards without leashes and perform fearless head dips and bona fide hang-tens, and you can almost hear those Beach Boys songs — once joyous, now slightly elegiac.

To the Summit: Fifty Mountains That Lure, Inspire and Challenge, edited by Joseph Poindexter (Black Dog & Leventhal, $40). This seven-pound monolith of a book evokes those places "where human ambition collides with the glacial indifference of dangerous terrain." Welcome to the hypoxic realms of 50 superlative peaks, documented here through color photographs (many included for their dizzying perspectives) and passages from classic mountaineering memoir, biography, and fiction. The images may be IMAX-worthy, but the well-chosen writings from the likes of James Salter, Jon Krakauer, and Mark Helprin pump pure oxygen.
Available at Amazon.com

World Mountaineering, edited by Audrey Salkeld, foreword by Chris Bonington (Bulfinch Press/Little, Brown, $50). If To the Summit is geared for the armchair alpinist, World Mountaineering is for the climber who's actually prepared to go. It profiles 52 of the world's most challenging mountains and provides useful briefings by climbers such as Stephen Venables, Julie-Ann Clyma, and Greg Child; photographs overlaid with route maps; and practical information on equipment, guides, and local conditions (the fjord at the base of Greenland's Nalumasortoq, for example, is home to some very tasty mussels).
Available at Amazon.com

Maroc, by Albert Watson (Rizzoli, $75). Scottish-born photographer Albert Watson is something of an enigma: blind in one eye yet a master of lighting, private yet famed for his celebrity portraits and fashion shots of Kate Moss et al. Maroc is his first single-subject project, a richly various portfolio of black-and-white images taken during a 39-day journey across Morocco. Unlike his previous book, Cyclops, there are no close-ups of Clint Eastwood, no contact sheets of mask-wearing monkeys. Instead, the places and people and moments that make up these images — a sepia-tone Saharan camel in half-silhouette, a mother and daughter sitting sidesaddle atop a donkey — create an austere yet chic scrapbook of the rough-hewn Moroccan landscape.
Available at Amazon.com

No Ordinary Land: Encounters in a Changing Environment, photographs by Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee (Aperture, $35). Beahan's and McPhee's landscapes are messy and complicated, revealing more — a bulldozer here, an unexpected human figure there — the longer you look, even as the hyper-real images blur the line between the natural and the artificial. Lugging their 18-pound Deardorff box camera (€ la Mathew Brady's Civil War rig) around the world, they seek out the unexpected and the incongruous: an Icelandic boy and his toy canoe in front of a geothermal plant, an artificial volcano erupting on the Las Vegas strip. In his afterword, John McPhee (Laura's father) describes the two photographers at work, their four legs poking out beneath the dark cloth, their two voices composing the ideal environmental-historical shot.
Available at Amazon.com

Chased by the Light, by Jim Brandenburg (Creative Editions/NorthWord Press, $35). On the eve of a recent autumn, Minnesota wildlife photographer Brandenburg decided to expose one frame — and only one frame — on each of 90 consecutive days. The product of his fastidious self-restraint is a lovely North Woods visual diary that takes us from a black spruce forest and a rain-beaded raven feather in September to a snow-blanketed pond illuminated by moonlight on the longest night of the year.
Available at Amazon.com

Photographs by Clay Ellis

Copyright 1998, Outside magazine