Wild Visions: Wilderness as Image and Idea
Yale University Press, 2022
Ben A Minteer, Mark Klett and Stephen J. Pyne • Foreword by Roderick Frazier Nash
A stunning combination of landscape photography and thematic essays exploring how the concept of wilderness has evolved over time
Our ideas of wilderness have evolved dramatically over the past one hundred and fifty years, from a view of wild country as an inviolable “place apart” to one that exists only within the matrix of human activity. This shift in understanding has provoked complicated questions about the importance of the wild in American environmentalism, as well as new aesthetic expectations as we reframe the wilderness as (to some degree) a human creation.
Wild Visions is distinctive in its union of landscape photography and environmental thought, a merging of short, thematic essays with a striking visual narrative. Often, the wild is viewed in binary terms: either revered as sacred and ecologically pure or dismissed as spoiled by human activities. This book portrays wilderness instead as an evolving gamut of understandings, a collage of views and ideas that is still in process.
In essays, dialogues, and photographs, this eloquent book circles through historically shifting definitions of the word ‘wilderness.’ The authors draw on their lives in the American West and decades of analysis to challenge our perceptions.
—Anne Wilkes Tucker, author of The Woman’s Eye