The Terra Galleria Blog – QT Luong

In the second installment of my selection of favorite black-and-white landscape photography books, we are moving up a bit in time compared to the first list, which did not include any living photographer. At sixty, I am no spring chicken, however all the photographers on this list are my seniors. Some are quite active in making new pictures or publishing new books. A key to longevity is to keep a life-long passion. Since there is always something left to learn and master in its art and craft, photography is not a bad choice.

Although the photographers on this list are alive, with maybe an exception, I wouldn’t generally call them contemporary. The next installment will clarify that. Shot on film, mostly with large-format cameras, and otherwise medium format, their work is deeply rooted in a tradition of fine craftsmanship where technical mastery and print quality reinforce the beauty of the subjects. They are not limited to the natural world. Still, few artifacts of modern civilization are present in their exploration of place and landscape. The books often convey a sense of timelessness through the enduring nature of their subjects and frequently explore spiritual themes. They are all from my collection – the vast majority signed or inscribed – and like in the previous installment, I have carefully paired them to highlight common themes and contrasts.

Paul Caponigro: The Wise Silence (1984)

Distinguished by a deeply spiritual and mystical approach, Paul Caponigro (born 1932) is one of America’s foremost landscape photographers. The Wise Silence is the best survey of his work. The images stand out through their ability to transcend literal representation, capturing the inner essence and metaphysical qualities of the subjects. An apple is transformed into a galaxy. Featuring landscapes, close-ups, ancient English stone monoliths, and Japanese shrines, they evoke a sense of timelessness and reverence. While reducing their brilliance, the printing on matte paper complements the contemplative and timeless nature of Caponigro’s work, inviting viewers into a meditative experience that reveals through transformative images the hidden beauty and deeper energies of the world.

John Sexton: Quiet Light (1990)

John Sexton (born 1953), a former assistant to Ansel Adams, continues his mentor’s meticulous attention to light and shadow through the mastery of the photographic process, frequently working in similar locations such as Yosemite and the California central coast. However, instead of emphasizing the grandeur and dramatic beauty of nature in bold compositions, Sexton focuses on its intimate details and its peaceful, contemplative moments. The book’s title refers to the pre-sunrise and post-sunset light the photographer favors to create soft and subtle photographs. With a focus on light and form, his images capture the quiet, often overlooked beauty in the natural world.

Bruce Barnbaum: Tone Poems (2001)

Despite his storied fifty-year career, Bruce Barnbaum (born 1943) still considers photography his hobby. His classic first book, Visual Symphony (1986), though renowned for its pioneering exploration of slot canyons – where his training in physics led him to see an electro-magnetic force field – also encompassed a diverse range of architectural and natural subjects in its four movements. Tone Poems broadens the scope. The two books are divided into six opuses, each a deep exploration of the dynamic interplay between forms and the dynamics found in both nature and the works of man, infusing his work with a sense of musicality and abstraction that invite introspection and engagement. The pairing of these opuses with carefully selected classical piano pieces enhances their emotional resonance, creating a multisensory journey that invites the viewer to “hear” the visual rhythms and “see” the music. The third book wasn’t published, but Barnbaum just released Discoveries of a Lifetime which he considers his Magnum Opus.

Huntington Witherill: Orchestrating Icons (2000)

Huntington Witherill (born 1949), after entering college as a music major to become a concert pianist started in 1970 a career in fine art photography characterized by a wide range of inanimate subjects and approaches. Yet, it is the classic western American landscape, as featured in Orchestrating Icons together with a few eastern waterfalls, that attracted him to photography. Focusing on the elegance of form, the refinement of composition, exquisitely varied tonality, and the precise orchestration of visual elements, he creates images that are precise, harmonious, and visually striking. The book sequences them with ebbs and flows reminiscent of a musical composition.

Roman Loranc: Two-hearted Oak (2003)

Roman Loranc (born 1956) emigrated from Poland but came to prominence with this tribute to the little-heralded landscapes of California’s Central Valley. Two-hearted Oak stands out for Loranc’s deep emotional connection to an overlooked land. His work is characterized by its intimate exploration of nature’s quiet and moody beauty. Often featuring fog-shrouded scenes that evoke a sense of mystery and timelessness, the split-toned photographs are imbued with a lyrical quality and a refined aesthetic. The titular oak, a recurring subject in his work, symbolizes resilience and endurance, embodying the spirit of the landscape itself.

Beth Moon: Ancient Trees (2014)

Beth Moon (born 1956) ventured to almost every continent for fourteen years, seeking out some of the largest, rarest, and oldest trees on Earth. Her signature use of the platinum/palladium printing process ensures that her images possess a depth and richness that reveal the intricate detail and enduring presence of the trees themselves, with the prints mirroring the longevity of her subjects. The result of this epic approach to nature is maybe the finest collection of tree portraits, and by far the best-selling title on this list. Including some of the strangest and most magnificent specimens, it emphasizes the timeless quality of nature’s most ancient forms.

Michael Kenna: Hokkaido (2006)

Michael Kenna (born 1953) has over ninety books and catalogs published. Mainly a landscape photographer working day and night in pastoral and urban spaces, his work is concerned with the interaction between the natural landscape and human-made structures. His unmistakably distinctive images, most often made in a square format and elaborately printed at a modest size identically reproduced in books, are atmospheric, peaceful, and minimalistic. His vision of simplicity reached a new level after he began to work in Japan, culminating in his winter travels to the northern island of Hokkaido, where he captured the ethereal beauty of snow-covered fields, solitary trees, and misty horizons. The frequent use of long exposures adds a contemplative and dreamlike quality to the images. Hokkaido is not a documentation of a place but rather a meditation on solitude, silence, and the quiet power of nature. Maple boards and textured Japanese paper make Hokkaido an uncommon art object, like Japan (2003), but those distinctively produced books can be expensive on the used market. As a more common book presentation of the work, I suggest Forms of Japan (2015).

Lee Friedlander – Western Landscapes (2016)

In a career spanning six decades and over fifty books, Lee Friedlander (born 1934), one of the most eminent living photographers, has produced an unrivaled output touching almost every subject matter, well beyond his extensive depiction of America’s “social landscape”, a term he coined, and of its inhabitants. Even more remarkable is that he has made a distinctive mark on almost every genre of photography, from self-portraiture and nudes to street photography. This equally distinctive body of work dates from the 1990s and early 2000s. Despite being often photographed in iconic national parks, Western Landscapes radically departs from the romanticized American landscape photography tradition by seeing the grandeur of the American West through a raw vision of realism, distortion, and complexity. Working quickly using a Hasselblad Superwide and flash at midday, his idiosyncratic, rule-breaking landscapes fill up the square format by fusing intricate foreground detail and vast backgrounds into chaotic, dense, and layered compositions. The relatively classical cover image doesn’t represent that he made many of the images from unconventional vantage points obscured by tangles. The 14×15″ book trim, largest of any on this list, is appropriate for the monumentality of the landscapes and the overload of visual information in the images.

Clyde Butcher: The Everglades (2020)

Despite having photographed landscapes internationally, Clyde Butcher (born 1942) will always be remembered for his life work in the Everglades. His Everglades photographs have been published in smaller volumes before. Nevertheless, with its large trim and extensive selection, this long-awaited self-published book is the first to do justice to his 36 years of pioneering Everglades photography. After being introduced to the swamp’s beauty, Butcher made his home there, when the Everglades were not recognized as a subject for landscape photography. Carrying an environmental message, the book is organized by ecosystems, emphasizing the overlooked diversity of this natural wonder. The photographs highlight the timelessness of its ancient, primal beauty. Butcher, known for his use of ultra-large format cameras and mural-sized prints of the American natural landscape, brings an unparalleled level of detail and grandeur to his images, allowing viewers to fully appreciate the vastness, intricate beauty, and ecological importance of this wild and fragile environment.

Kenro Izu: A Thirty-Year Retrospective (2010)

Kenro Izu’s (born 1949) work includes floral and nude still-life work in the studio. However, this retrospective is focused on his most sustained project, which explores the spiritual and historical significance of sacred sites in over 30 countries, with also a dozen portraits. The quiet photographs evoke a sense of reverence and contemplation for ancient structures and landscapes that have endured through centuries. Known for his meticulous craftsmanship, Izu has been using since 1983 a large format camera producing 14”x20” negatives. The great beauty of the resulting platinum-palladium prints fully expresses the stillness and timelessness of the world’s sacred places.

Martha Casanave: Explorations Along an Imaginary Coastline (2006)

Martha Casanave (born 1946) photographs mostly people, which is why she included a small mysterious figure with a bowl hat in Explorations Along an Imaginary Coastline. The dreamy and surreal images, all created near her home on the Monterey Peninsula, combine a strong sense of place with an uncommon vision, aided by a pinhole camera that produces images with infinite depth of field and very blurred waters. The coastline is not just a physical setting. It serves as a symbolic landscape, where the lines between real and imagined are obscured, the familiar and the fantastical blended, creating a narrative that explores place, identity, and the mysteries of the subconscious.

Geir Jordahl: Searching for True North (2007)

Geir Jordahl (born 1957) pushes the limits of human perception through unconventional formats while probing the spiritual significance of the places he visits. The images in Searching for True North were made with a Widelux panoramic camera meant for wide horizontal subjects, but all the photographs in the book are vertical. Likewise, most of the images were photographed with infrared film, which reverses expected tones. The presentation beyond what is in front of our eyes is exemplified by the otherworldly cover image from Canyonlands National Park, where the daytime sky appears filled with stars and contrails. Those technical choices transform real and sometimes well-worn places into metaphorical landscapes. Jordahl’s work is not just a visual journey spanning 30 years of travels around the world, but a philosophical one, making this book a quest for understanding of self and place in the world. He continues his explorations with The Endless Sphere of Time, a new book of spherical photographs.

If you have any favorites that fit within the parameters of this list, please mention them in the comments!