Every now and then, a book comes along, which is a type of unfolding. It gives us a glimpse of something we’ve already known, but in such a completely new way that it strikes us as both familiar and fresh.

Sometimes, this type of book is a backstage look at this or that, or it’s a collection of outtakes. We’re not seeing something necessarily new, but we’re seeing the unguarded or unplanned moment. This allows for a more complete knowledge, to be sure. Although we may not know the subject differently, we do know it more.

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“Nature’s Writers”, by Donald S. Clark
Published by Rizzoli, 2024
review by W. Scott Olsen

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In other instances, however, the new work is a completely different genre itself. The writings of a musician, for example. The paintings of a physicist. What we see is something we know and perhaps already love, but in a completely different language, using a completely different aesthetic vocabulary. These books become important to us, and a treasure, because they are a different window into one of the many joys we hold dear.

I’m thinking about this because I have a book called Nature’s Writers by Donald S. Clark on my desk today. Nature’s Writers is a remarkable collection of elegant landscape images, and the book’s thesis idea is wonderful.

What Clark decided to do was travel North America to photograph the landscapes inhabited by American nature writers. The result should not be surprising—think about it; we’ve been reading these authors for years, taking their descriptions of their landscapes into our heads, our hearts and souls—and yet Clark’s book is illuminating.

Most of the writers in Clark’s book are very well known. Think Edward Abbey, Rick Bass, John Burroughs, Rachel Carson, Gretel Ehrlich, John Muir, and Henry David Thoreau. Some of the writers may not be as well known outside the community of people who read nature writing, but all are established and important voices.

Those of us who read nature or environmental literature have loved these authors for years. We have found them to be important to our own sense of being a responsible citizen, to our own sense of being in whatever small way a steward of the planet. But the images of the landscapes we hold in our heads from their books are imaginary. They are translations of words into whatever images we conjure. The mountains surrounding Rick Bass’s Yaak Valley, for example, which I have seen a thousand times in his prose but never visited in real life, are a construct of his words and whatever mountains I may have been in before.

Then comes this book. Clark decided to visit the landscapes that nature writers found as their source of inspiration and subjects with his camera. Picking up this book (and full disclosure, I am a great fan of nature writing), I was immediately impressed and captivated. “Oh,” I thought, over and over.  “Oh, that’s what it looks like. Oh, my. It’s beautiful.”

In her preface, poet Camille Dungy writes, “Clark’s images convey the kind of patience that lots of people don’t seem to possess these days. His lens caught smiling prairie dogs and flitting damsel flies and even seemed to catch Lewis flax blossoms mid-bow in an early spring breeze.”

The images are that good.

In a forward by nature writer Bill McKibben, he writes, talking about his visits with other nature writers throughout North America, “It’s always and forever a delight to be shown these places by the people who love them. No matter the circumstance, there is a particular joy to showing off one’s own place.”

He goes on to say, “Our culture—which by now involves staring at smartphones for constant updates—is a recipe for self-absorption. By contrast, it is impossible to wander any wild place and not be reminded that you are a fairly minor element in the great opera of space and time that whirls by unstopping. All of which is to say that I think Don has conducted one of the most potent literary critiques I can imagine, almost certainly more useful than many of the more formal investigations carried out in university English departments, where all of these writers are put under the microscope. The wide-angle lens, it turns out, is a better tool. If you really want to understand these wonderful writers, you need to know where they’re coming from, and now you do.”

The book contains more than 40 writers, arranged alphabetically, and ranges all over the country, including Hawaii. Every writer is given two spreads, a total of four pages. The first spread of each author’s section begins with a single image and a short quote from their work. We get a taste of their style and their language and their love for the land.

For example, the quote in Pam Houston’s Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country reads, “When you give yourself holy to a piece of ground, its goodness enters your bloodstream like an infusion. You will never be alone in the same way again and never quite dislocated. Your heart will grow down into and back out of that ground like a tree.”

This is followed by a spread that contains three or more images of the same setting, all in beautiful color.

The scope of this book is breathtaking. Yet, what’s easy to miss with this book is the extraordinary quality of the images. These are extraordinary writers. We assume excellence. We assume a kind of talent as common ground here, so it’s easy to get caught up with the images as representations of Barry Lopez or Linda Hasselstrom or Peter Matthiessen or Sigrid Olson.

But if you pause for just a second and think about it, this book is mainly an act of talent and genius by Don Clark. How do you discover, in a small handful of images, the kind of insight these writers have found in their books? Nature’s Writers’ thesis is an attempt to give us an image of the real ground behind the writers’ words. But to think of this book merely as a reference would be a disservice. Clark’s ability to capture the subtlety of Paul Gruchow’s Minnesota prairie, the light of Edward Abbey’s Utah, the textures of Susan Cerulean’s Florida, the greens of Edward Hoagland’s Vermont, the textures of J. Drew Lanham’s South Carolina is expressive and nuanced. Clark read almost everything by the authors, and his knowledge of their milieu is evident in every image.

Here, we have one of our best nature and landscape photographers paying homage to a different genre. The photography is illuminating, insightful, and elegant.

For that, I am very grateful.

A note from FRAMES: Please let us know if you have an upcoming or recently published photography book.