Intimate Landscapes, an exhibition of fifty-five color photographs by Eliot Porter, is the first one-man exhibition of color photographs ever presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Works by Eliot Porter entered the Museum's collection as far back as 1949, when Georgia O'Keeffe presented from the Estate of Alfred Stieglitz an important collection of photographs assembled by Stieglitz himself. This collection included three early black and white prints by Eliot Porter, one of which is reproduced in this catalogue. All the photographs in the present exhibition brilliantly reflect the standards of excellence that are Eliot Porter's greatest contribution to the field of color photography. Upon seeing these photographs, the viewer is immediately struck by the artist's distinctly individual and intimate interpretation of the natural world.

Internationally acclaimed landscape photographer and California native and resident Carr Clifton presents a stunning new collection of large format images of that most diverse and beautiful of American states, California. Carr Clifton has gained wide recognition for his startling color photographs of California wilderness. Considered one of the leading young interpreters of the natural world working in film today, he has published widely including Wild by Law from the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.

Robert Thayer brings the concepts and promises of the growing bioregional movement to a wide audience in a book that passionately urges us to discover "where we are" as an antidote to our rootless, stressful modern lives. LifePlace is a provocative meditation on bioregionalism and what it means to live, work, eat, and play in relation to naturally, rather than politically, defined areas. In it, Thayer gives a richly textured portrait of his own home, the Putah-Cache watershed in California's Sacramento Valley, demonstrating how bioregionalism can be practiced in everyday life. Written in a lively anecdotal style and expressing a profound love of place, this book is a guide to the personal rewards and the social benefits of reinhabiting the natural world on a local scale. In LifePlace, Thayer shares what he has learned over the course of thirty years about the Sacramento Valley's geography, minerals, flora, and fauna; its relation to fire, agriculture, and water; and its indigenous peoples, farmers, and artists. He shows how the spirit of bioregionalism springs from learning the history of a place, from participating in its local economy, from living in housing designed in the context of the region. He asks: How can we instill a love of place and knowledge of the local into our education system? How can the economy become more responsive to the ecology of region? This valuable book is also a window onto current writing on bioregionalism, introducing the ideas of its most notable proponents in accessible and highly engaging prose. At the same time that it gives an entirely new appreciation of California's Central Valley, LifePlace shows how we can move toward a new way of being, thinking, and acting in the world that can lead to a sustainable, harmonious, and more satisfying future.

John Chiara creates his own cameras and chemical processes, in order to make unique photographs that use the direct exposure of light onto reversal film and paper. Each resulting photograph is a singular, luminous object. This highly anticipated first book includes the surreal and thrilling landscape and architectural images for which the artist has become known. John Chiara: California features images taken in the artist's hometown of San Francisco and other locations along the Pacific Coast. An essay by Virginia Heckert situates Chiara's work in the landscape tradition of the American West and discusses this process-driven work.

Aaron Gilbreath writes a highly personal narrative of the San Joaquin Valley that incorporates history, Native American displacement, agriculture, environmental concerns, and more.

"A young girl delicately chastises her uncle returned from World War I: 'You could have written about home . . . I don't know. Remembering. About missing the things at home, about missing.' "Early in Thomas McConnell's story collection, A Picture Book of Hell and Other Landscapes, the work's overarching theme announces itself in such moments of minimalist dialogue, a theme reworked, replayed and reinterpreted through a group of loosely connected vignettes that come together convincingly within the context of the book: that of longing, of yearning, of the not always reconcilable importance and impermanence of human connection."--Charleston Post & Courier"All humans are in some sense exiled."--Hugh KennerImagine Chaucer's pilgrims--without a Canterbury. Across a landscape devoid of monumental shrines, they would wander still, having no more alternative than the planet swimming in its system, just as they would continue to talk the stories of their lives.Such pilgrims are the characters inhabiting A Picture Book of Hell. In stories and situations that chime against one another like variations on musical themes, the quiet wanderers in this collection seem all entrained on the "pointless quest for the questless point," as one narrator concludes. Two old friends repeatedly fail to rendezvous, save in the last connection of a suicide note. A reluctant bank teller abandons his life and his rented house to take the place of a dead vagabond. The volume's title novella discloses a veteran of the First World War struggling to reconcile the two worlds he's come to know too well, neither of which seems to fit his frame.From Ireland to the New South, whether exiled from home or homeland, from others or their own retreating selves, these characters rustle through their days rather like the series of small and vulnerable creatures that scurry and flee through the landscapes of these allusive and elliptical stories.

Its hard to imagine Californias landscape before European explorers arrived and recorded what they saw. Laura Cunninghams research goes well beyond that and her art brings that landscape to life once again

“Nothing defines California and our nation’s heritage as significantly or emotionally,” says the California Mission Foundation, “as do the twenty-one missions that were founded along the coast from San Diego to Sonoma.” Indeed, the missions collectively represent the state’s most iconic tourist destinations and are touchstones for interpreting its history. Elementary school students today still make model missions evoking the romanticized versions of the 1930s. Does it occur to them or to the tourists that the missions have a dark history? California Mission Landscapes is an unprecedented and fascinating history of California mission landscapes from colonial outposts to their reinvention as heritage sites through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Illuminating the deeply political nature of this transformation, Elizabeth Kryder-Reid argues that the designed landscapes have long recast the missions from sites of colonial oppression to aestheticized and nostalgia-drenched monasteries. She investigates how such landscapes have been appropriated in social and political power struggles, particularly in the perpetuation of social inequalities across boundaries of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and religion. California Mission Landscapes demonstrates how the gardens planted in mission courtyards over the past 150 years are not merely anachronistic but have become potent ideological spaces. The transformation of these sites of conquest into physical and metaphoric gardens has reinforced the marginalization of indigenous agency and diminished the contemporary consequences of colonialism. And yet, importantly, this book also points to the potential to create very different visitor experiences than these landscapes currently do. Despite the wealth of scholarship on California history, until now no book has explored the mission landscapes as an avenue into understanding the politics of the past, tracing the continuum between the Spanish colonial period, emerging American nationalism, and the contemporary heritage industry.

A splendid catalog for the exhibition organized by the Oakland Museum (and scheduled to tour the US and Europe through 1992). The photos are very well represented. They include landscape, historic, and artistic pictures as well as social statements and whimsy. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR