The National Parks
Our American Landscape - by Ian Shive
Jeri Jacquin
BookWorm Review
In this book, “The National Parks: Our American Landscape” by Ian Shive, we are introduced into a world few are blessed enough to view. Shive, a former marketer for Sony’s Columbia Pictures, has brought his view of the world as he sees it through the lens of his Cannon 5D 35mm full-frame camera.
With a combination of a family love of photography and a strong belief that there is a challenge in the attempt to tell a story through photographs, Shive delivers. Being an environmental conservation photographer, he is dedicated in making the world aware of what is happening around us.
The book idea, he says, came through these experiences and places visited. He also wants two stories to emerge: the one you want to tell and the one it takes to get the shot! He has had work published in such well-known magazines as Popular Photo, Ski, Time Magazine and National Geographic.
That concept in mind, Shive takes two cameras and twenty batteries, 7,200 feet up to a base camp on Mt. McKinley in Denali, Alaska. At this point there is no horizon line. He also must be trained for rescue procedures to hop a ride up to this majestic point of our planet.
Here is what I came away with looking at this beautiful book. Impressive ariel views of Mt. McKinley, ancient pictographs from Native Americans, a lone wolf on the snows of Lamar Valley, the Alaskan range in a high altitude helicopter, and the remains of a 225 million year old tree in the Petrified Forest National Park.
The exquisite cover imparts a poem that rings, “What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wilderness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wilderness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet” (Gerard Manley Hopkins) and this would be a moving enough introduction but there is more.
Shive is given high praise with a foreword by Thomas C. Kreman, President of the National Parks and Conservation Association who thanks Shive for having the skill and the will to rise at dawn to get these shots.
To follow is an essay by Scott Kirkwood, Editor of National Parks Magazine who thanks Ian for “noticing a single red leaf underfoot (pg. 181), that that might have gone unnoticed”. This particular photograph is one of my favorites for its simplicity, color and down right coolness!
Included also is another essay by Amy Leinback Marquis, who referred to the photographs as “a gift to the people who call this planet home”. It is a glorious way to describe turning each page and being greeted by a photograph that makes you smile, contemplate and be awestruck.
Finally, there is an introduction by Ian Shive, himself as he talks about the history and the personal journey to capture his two great passions – photography and America’s National Parks.
Then begins page after page of rich color, which hold meaning to each eye that beholds them. Even as, on occasion, we might see the world as small – with the turn of a page the vision of where we live expands. In this expansion are the beauty, grace, harshness and barren (hot or cold) of life on our planet.
The photographs are endearing, such as the flower and the ant (Spreading Phlox) that presents us with intriguing colors and display each object as having their place in this size minded world. From the mountains, deserts, and oceans to a flowered valley, Shive captures the constant and the contrasts between these places in time.
In an abandon 519 train at the Steamtown National Historic site with a silent whistle that longs to relive a time gone by, this photographer allows us in to view a quiet moment of a history that once was.
Even the simplicity of dew on grass, each photo is – exactly what it is – the struggle and inspiration to life in unsuspecting places.
This is a marvelous collection of photographs and, for any photographer, a must have! To read more about Ian Shive, his in-depth biography, his conservation work and to see more of his beautiful photographs, please go to
www.waterandsky.com.
