Our Beautiful, Fragile World: The Nature and Environmental Photographs of Peter Essick Author: Peter Essick | Language: English | ISBN:
1937538346 | Format: PDF
Our Beautiful, Fragile World: The Nature and Environmental Photographs of Peter Essick Description
Our Beautiful, Fragile World features a career-spanning look at the images of photojournalist Peter Essick taken while on assignment for National Geographic magazine. In this book, Essick showcases a diverse series of photographs from some of the most beautiful natural areas in the world and documents major contemporary environmental issues, such as climate change and nuclear waste.
Each photograph is accompanied by commentary on the design process of the image, Essick's personal photographic experiences, and informative highlights from the research he completed for each story. Our Beautiful, Fragile World takes the reader on a journey around the globe, from the Oulanka National Park near the Arctic Circle in Finland to the Adelie penguin breeding grounds in Antarctica.
Our Beautiful, Fragile World will interest photographers of all skill levels. It carries an important message about conservation, and the photographs provide a compelling look at our environment that will resonate with people of all ages who care about the state of the natural world.
Foreword by Jean-Michel Cousteau.
- Hardcover: 124 pages
- Publisher: Rocky Nook; 1 edition (December 12, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1937538346
- ISBN-13: 978-1937538347
- Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 10.4 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Peter Essick has a difficult job. He must make beautiful photographs that reveal the way mankind is destroying its environment. That he does so is quite amazing, although he must give the lie to the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. It is often only by reading the text on the full page opposite an image that we realize that a photo is laden with doom and gloom.
Essick has the dream job of many a photographer. He works the environmental beat for National Geographic. He apparently travels the world searching for images that tell us that humans are fouling their own nest. Were the images not so well made, this book might almost be overwhelmingly depressing, especially since the photographer offers few solutions to the many problems. Perhaps the photographer doesn't want to acknowledge that we can only prevent environmental disaster by giving up some of the extravagances, and even what we might consider necessities, of modern life.
Although the book is replete with great images, my favorite is a view of Butte, Montana. The image is divided into thirds from right to left, foreground to background. In the right foreground is a shingled house with a window through which a young boy is looking. In the center, middle ground is a deteriorated wood-board structure. On the left and background is a part of Butte, filled with tipples and mine heads and either an open pit-mine or piles of tailings. One can only wonder what future the boy will face in this damaged landscape.
What a contrast this makes to a book released by the same publisher a month earlier, Jack Dykinga's "
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