Recent Terrains: Terraforming the American West (Creating the North American Landscape),Used

Recent Terrains: Terraforming the American West (Creating the North American Landscape),Used

In Stock
SKU: SONG0801864003
Brand: Brand: The Johns Hopkins University Press
$9.37
Quantity
Add to wishlist
Add to compare

Processing time: 1-3 days

US Orders Ships in: 3-5 days

International Orders Ships in: 8-12 days

Return Policy: 15-days return on defective items

Payment Option
Payment Methods

Help

If you have any questions, you are always welcome to contact us. We'll get back to you as soon as possible, withing 24 hours on weekdays.

Customer service

All questions about your order, return and delivery must be sent to our customer service team by e-mail at yourstore@yourdomain.com

Sale & Press

If you are interested in selling our products, need more information about our brand or wish to make a collaboration, please contact us at press@yourdomain.com

In this book of sixty blackandwhite panoramas, photographer Laurie Brown documents the changing landscape along the western edge of Southern California. These stark, compelling images reveal a world scraped and reshaped by construction equipmentboulders pushed aside, stretches of earth flattened and then measured with surveyor sticks. Hightech housing developments rise in these places, lines of identical homes that simultaneously offer a pleasing vision of order and a numbing prospect of sterile conformity. Recent Terrains: Terraforming the American West is a thoughtful sequence of photographs that consider how the planet's surface has been transformed to meet the needs of our consumer society.The term terraforming originated in Kim Stanley Robinson's science fiction trilogy about the colonization of Mars, in which that planet is reshaped for human settlers. The panoramic format of Brown's photographs is partly inspired by space photographywith their long and low perspectives of the horizon, these photos give us views of our own planet as it might be seen by the Mars explorer. But if many of the images look like alien landscapes, they reveal a familiar shift in American geography: the wild, agricultural terrain of our early frontier gives way to densely built suburban communities.Brown's photographs are neutral about what they record, dramatizing some of the tensions and dualities that comprise our society's complex relationship to nature. She shows the invasion of unspoiled territory by the hightech developments we so often label with the pejorative term suburban sprawl. At the same time, however, she uncovers surreal stillness and beauty in the built environment, searching for a postindustrial idea of the sublime.Taken during the last decade of the twentieth century, these photographs serve as an archive of change at a specific place on the coastal edge of California at the turn of the millennium. But these images have larger relevance for all of us, exploring our ideas about what constitutes a home and what defines our sense of community.The book is divided into three sections, each prefaced by a poem by Los Angeles poet Martha Ronk; it concludes with an essay by renowned writer and conservationist Charles E. Little. Recent Terrains is a major photographic worka thoughtful, serious book of time and place.

⚠️ WARNING (California Proposition 65):

This product may contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm.

For more information, please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.

Recently Viewed