Product Description

Glen Canyon, now Lake Powell, is rediscovered through wonderful color images by Eliott Porter.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1053674 in Books
• Published on: 2000-07-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This is a 25th anniversary edition, revised and updated, of master nature photographer Porter's 1963 paean to a unique natural wonder of compressed geology and atmospheric caprice now long since extinguished by a power-project dam. The work still excites as both camera art and a spur to wilderness preservation. Light, shadow and tinted hue play changes on the canyon's walls, rifts and waters in Porter's color plates, here accompanied by quotations from Thoreau, Loren Eiseley, Owen Wister, Wallace Stegner and others. The assemblage of "carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds and monuments" that Porter calls "the Colorado's masterwork" was discovered by John Wesley Powell in 1869. Porter mourns a vanished river passage that "mirrors pink rocks and cerulean sky" and in whose narrow chasms "streams of melted gems flow over purple sands." Though imperceptible in its original state, Glen Canyon on these picture-pages persists and is fittingly commemorated. (February
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Inside Flap
"The Place No One Knew was published as a eulogy to a magical place," writes Daniel P. Beard, former commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation.

Glen Canyon disappeared slowly and quietly as a hard-fought political compromise led to its flooding when the gates of the new Glen Canyon were closed in 1963 and water began to back up in the canyon. Glen Canyon was a place of extraordinary beauty. Foremost environmental activist David Brower touts Glen Canyon Dam as "a major mistake of our time."

Two generations later, this commemorative edition of Eliot Porter's exquisite photographs of the canyon he loved and knew intimately is reprinted as a symbol of hope for the restoration of Glen Canyon.

A Glen Canyon happens only once; there is no scenic climax anywhere that can quite approach it. Carved into a lonely provinceof Utah's desert country, the canyon's importance was not sensed by the public nor understood well enough by anyone. Yet few wilderness gorges have been easier to drift through and to live with, or so rewarding to those who reached even the threshold of its inner world of side canyons.

Glen Canyon was a little too mysterious, too aloof. An never in the history of man's effort to preserve great scenic resources has his lack of knowledge been so costly. How much is gone now; how damaging man's exploitative urge can be, how little we see, sometimes, until it is too late--these questions find part of their answer in what Eliot Porter has assembled here.

From the Back Cover
"Remember these things lost.

The native wildlife; the chance to float quietly down a calm river,

to let the current carry you past a thousand years of history,

through a living canyon of incredible, haunting beauty.

Here the Colorado had created a display that rivaled any in the world.

The side canyons simply had no rivals.

We lost wholeness, integrity in place . . .

a magnificent gesture of the natural world."

--David Brower

Customer Reviews

A beautiful and truly tragic book
I'm at something of a loss to explain why I've been so moved by a place I never saw and (barring visionary leadership and luck) never will. I was born about two years before the diversion tunnels closed in 1963. I, and most likely you, never had a chance to know what was there.

What was there was, quite simply, the most beautiful place in the world, and Eliot Porter's photographs make this abundantly clear. A calm Colorado River gently whisked travelers through nearly two hundred miles of Glen Canyon, past zebra-striped 2,000-foot walls and twisted domes and spires of bare rock. Dozens of old mining camps and thousands of Anasazi sites, pictographs and petroglyphs lined the banks. Hundreds of smaller side canyons branched from the river. Some opened into massive ampitheaters like Music Temple and Cathedral in the Desert. Others twisted and turned for miles into salmon-colored sandstone, the rock's convolutions hiding the sky from view. In spots you could span the width of a canyon 500 feet deep with your outstretched arms. These were canyons lush with moss and trees, watered by streams and springs and rich with wildlife - all in the heart of one of America's most forbidding regions, all accessible to anyone with a canoe or rubber raft and a week or two of extra time.

Now all of this is gone. The reservoir has inundated almost every scene portrayed in Porter's photographs with hundreds of feet of water and mud. A few pathetic fragments of the canyon's beauty and solitude remain along the northern edge of Escalante National Monument, but all of its most magical places have been obliterated beneath a faceless sump of oily water across which houseboats rumble and jetskis roar.

The NPS and Bureau of Reclamation harp upon the "improved accessibilty" afforded by the lake. They neglect to mention the inaccessibility of permanently submerged canyons and the financial cost of trying to explore Glen Canyon in its current lobotomized state. To leaf through this book is to know what we had - an incredibly beautiful place, of National Park caliber - and also to know that we threw it away for the sake of a few megawatts of electricity, a net annual loss of available water for downstream use and for the purpose of boosting gasoline and boat sales in Coconino County, Arizona.

Perhaps there's an emotional explanation for being haunted by a place I'll never see - an outraged sense of having been robbed.

Oversized Paperback Rivals Original Sierra Club Hardback
I was expecting a reprint similar to the small-sized Ballantine issue of the late 1960s. I was surprised to receive a book almost as large as the original Sierra Club hardback! The color in several of the photographs is even better than in the original (and difficult to find/very expensive) book, thanks in part to the cooperation of the museum which received Porter's works as a bequest.

A visual rhapsody
I got a copy of Eliot Porter's Glen Canyon book after reading Edward Abbey's "Desert Solitaire," a chapter of which is devoted to a downriver rafting trip along this stretch of the Colorado River just before the dam was built. While Abbey's descriptions are vivid, I wanted to see with my own eyes what he was describing. And Porter's camera is the closest you can get to doing that today.

His pictures are, of course, not the real thing, but they are about as breathtaking as photography can be. The colors, textures, reflections, and the play of light and shadow are wonderful, and each photograph is distinctly different. His own description of the canyon's display of color and light in the introductory essay "The Living Canyon" give an instructive insight into the eye of the photographer. His awareness of what he is looking at and his ways of choosing to look help the reader to see even more in the 80 photographs that follow.

While some of the photographs capture the monumental scale of the canyon walls and formations, many focus on the myriad surfaces that are revealed to the eye: erosion patterns, lichen, rippling water flow, the dark streaking mineral stains extending from seeps, the rough texture of weathered sandstone in glancing sunlight, smooth river stones, the layered stripes of exposed sediment, the trickling spread of water falling from overhead springs, the hanging tapestry coloration of the walls, whorled and striated rock, dry sand. There are also photographs of plants: moonflower, maidenhair fern, willow, tamarisk, redbud, columbine, cane. Above all, there is the rich array of colors, capturing a great variety of moods and attitudes.

Porter was recognized for his photography of birds, and while there are no birds visible in these photographs, his introductory essay makes mention of them, and when looked at with that awareness, many of the pictures also seem to capture a sense of "air space" for flight. Before turning to photography, Porter was a Harvard professor of biochemistry and bacteriology, and it's interesting to see the somewhat dispassionate eye of the scientist in the way he uses the camera. While the story of Glen Canyon may induce sorrow or anger, the photographs are strong for their lack of sentimentality.

The pictures also excite a curiosity about the geology of the river, and the book concludes with a short essay describing how the canyon walls reveal the geological ages that have gone into forming this part of the earth, going back millions of years. The book also includes a catalog of all the plants and animals that inhabited Glen Canyon before its inundation. Altogether, with its quotes from other writers, including Loren Eiseley, Joseph Wood Krutch, Wallace Stegner, and members of John Wesley Powell's expedition in the 19th century, this book is a fitting record of a great lost national treasure.