Whether this book of color photographs accurately shows what Alaska really looks like, I don't know, because I haven't been there yet. But having finished it, I'm planning my trip!But I can say this is a great book of photographs of nature. Anyone who loves to look at photographs will love this book. Wolfe demonstrates that he is one of the greatest living outdoor photographers. His sense of light and composition is unexcelled. Almost every picture has a strong sense of line, either vertical, horizontal or diagonal. And the range of light is exceptional, often including in the same picture the darkest blacks and the brightest whites.
The handling of sky is as sublime as that of any of the 19th century American landscape painters. I'm certain that there must be plain blue skies in Alaska but every one of Wolfe's skies has clouds that are fleecy, or glowering, or mysterious. And the light that falls on the landscapes illuminates them with a strange beauty whether casting deep, hard-edged shadows that make a rugged peak look even more majestic; or soft shadows that fall across a brush-covered hillside and create a subtle modulation of green; or the red rays of the magic hours of dawn and dusk.
Occasionally his pictures take on a strange abstraction that requires a careful examination to discover what one is looking at, like the pictures of white ice floes on the surface of an inky-black river or the network of crevasses on a glacier with a few spots of emerald blue in the white field, where the snow has melted into a pond reflecting the sky.
Wolfe is a master of color field photography. Consider the brownish, grayish web of fine lines with several smears of white across it that resolves into a portrait of musk oxen with white horns and muzzles. Or the white arctic foxes in the snow with a bare hint of orange on their undersides. Or the receding green hillsides distinguished only by differing textures with a tiny browsing caribou in the foreground.
The text by Nick Jans is sometimes overly poetic and almost unnecessary given the photographs although explaining just what it is that makes tundra tundra has some interest. However when I turn the page to see just the top halves of the heads of two fierce little owls peeking at me with yellow eyes hidden amongst a row of wildflowers in the Arctic Wild Life Refuge, words disappear from my mind.
Most people agree that Alaska is one of the last great wildernesses and that we are unlikely to see anything more exciting in our lives. Art Wolfe has captured the excitement of Alaska. He has also captured the excitement of great photography.
