NEW BOOK!
PATH OF BEAUTY:
Photographic Adventures in the Grand Canyon
128 pages, hardbound, 75 color photographs, 12x12.5"
published by St. Martin's Press
SIGNED COPIES AVAILABLE:
$39.99 + $6.01 shipping and handling. Colorado residents add $1.64 for sales tax.
Allow 2 weeks for delivery of media mail.
Send a $46.00 check to: Chris Brown, 4340 13th Street, Boulder, CO 80304
for credit card instruction, e-mail me: cb@ChrisBrownPhotography.com
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Review of Path of Beauty in the Boulder Daily Camera:
Local photographer's task: find a new angle on the Grand Canyon - Boulder Daily Camera http://www.dailycamera.com/books/ci_16429551#ixzz13xJcuM9M
CLICK HERE TO SEE A BROCHURE OF THE BOOK
CLICK HERE TO SEE 20 PHOTOS FROM THE BOOK
Text of review by Reed Glenn, from the Boulder Daily Camera:
Path of Beauty: Photographic Adventures in the Grand Canyon, by Chris Brown. St. Martin s Press, 128 pp. $39.99.
Forget about "second sight" -- Boulder photographer Christopher Brown dazzles us with what he calls "First Sight" in his new book, "Path of Beauty: Photographic Adventures in the Grand Canyon." The book is the culmination of Brown's 35 years' experience as a Grand Canyon adventurer, guide, boatman, photographer and quasi-philosopher.
As one of the most magnificent, overpowering and over-photographed wonders of the world, the Grand Canyon challenges photographers to find something new. Brown's extraordinary eye and technique make even Canyon veterans feel like they're seeing it for the first time -- and in a kind of high-definition, 3-D uber-reality.
Swirling, sinuous sandstone and slot-canyon mazes become portals to another world of heightened color awareness and expanded texture consciousness. Nature's intricate patterns and forms turn into mesmerizing mandalas. Compositions themed "What Water Sees" create optical illusions with reflection upon reflection, where water becomes rock walls, and rock walls appear to be thin air. "North Canyon Pools" is one such mystifying photo. Grand panoramas take on a soft, painterly quality.
In addition to 75 knockout, eye-popping photos, the stunning tabletop photo book includes well-penned, reflective essays with lessons on geology, hydrology, boatmanship, adventure, beauty, photography and a bit of neurophysiology and spiritual musing.
Brown first hiked the Grand Canyon at age 15. Inspired by an Outward Bound course after high school, he decided to spend his life guiding mountaineering and river trips in North and South America. As a boatman in the Grand Canyon for 20 years he rowed 35 two-week trips on the unruly Colorado River. The book's adventure chapter about a river-rafting near disaster displays his talent with storytelling in words as well as photos.
Brown says the book goes from the literal to the more abstract in both the text and the photographs. The book begins with the lure and lore of the canyon, and ends with the psychology and physiology of perception and its relationship with Brown's photographic approach.
His approach involves trying to experience and reproduce "First Sight," similar to an infant's perception of the world -- totally sensory and emotional with no previous associations. He references the book, "My Stroke of Insight" by Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist who had a stroke in her mid-30s and detailed the experience, part of which was a sort of nirvana. Functioning only with her right brain, everything was beautiful, interconnected, without reason, meaning, history, association or context, Brown writes. "When she returned to her linear, analytical left brain, she was reconnected to language, memory, and rational thinking," but lost the experience of pure bliss. Brown strives to capture that "First Sight" experience with his images.
"I use a large format view camera, partly because it is so cumbersome to use that it forces me to slow down, and this helps me to avoid quick, shallow responses," he writes. "It's a slow, tedious, methodical process, but more contemplative than point-and-shoot."
A view camera is like the old-fashioned type with an accordion-pleated box that encloses the space between the lens and film. The flexible bellows allows focusing. There's even the dark cloth that the photographer puts over his head, and the whole apparatus sits on a tripod. The image the photographer sees is upside down, adding to the complexity.
The advantage of the large format camera is much higher resolution since it uses 50 times more film than a 35-mm camera. Brown's camera produces 4-by-5-inch color transparencies, which he scans, then manipulates digitally. Brown does his own printing, preferring his own colors to those of a lab.
"My job, as a photon wrangler, is to herd photons through all those conversions and transmogrifications so that what goes into your eyes bears some resemblance to what I saw in the Grand Canyon," Brown writes. "There are so many changes that take place it is amazing that we can recognize anything of the original scene in the final print. It is a two-dimensional piece of paper imitating a three-dimensional world. It has a luminosity range of only one-quarter of the world it represents, and the colors are imitated by tiny drops of three colors of inks sprayed onto a piece of paper.
"When people ask me if I change or enhance anything, it is difficult to know whether 'yes' or 'no' is the more correct answer. The physics of sight is so incredibly complex, and the fact that a print can mimic the visual experience always seems like such magic to me, that the notion of veracity seems to get lost along the way. I go through all of this to get back to where I started?" On first sight, Brown's "Path of Beauty" promises to last.
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