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Book
Review: THE YOSEMITE, by John Muir, introduction and photographs by Galen
Rowell, Yosemite Association: 224 pp., $24.95
by Jonathan
Kirsch
Los Angeles Times, March 31, 2002
A full century separates the first trek into Yosemite Valley by John Muir,
the 19th century naturalist and pioneering environmental activist, from the
more recent expeditions of photographer Galen Rowell, but the juxtaposition
of their work in "The Yosemite" is apt and illuminating. Muir's
classic work of natural history, first published in 1912, is here illustrated
with more than 100 contemporary images that allow us to see for ourselves
what Muir meant when he wrote that "the Sierra should be called, not
the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light."
The book reproduces the entire text of Muir's original, but the glory of "The Yosemite" is the superb color plates, each one annotated with a quotation from Muir's writings and a comment from Rowell. Although Rowell credits Muir for the remarkable fact that we can still see many of the same sights that the pioneering preservationist first glimpsed so long ago, Rowell is certainly not shy about showing us Yosemite through his own lens and answering Muir in his own words.
When, for example, Muir writes that "a wild scene, but not a safe one, is made by the moon as it appears through the edge of the Yosemite Fall," Rowell responds by showing us his own startling image of the falls by moonlight. His 45-second exposure captures the rock face, the falling water and the stars in the sky with an intensity that the rods and cones of the human eye cannot match. "In this case," the photographer explains, "photography allowed me to see more than met my eye."
Only rarely does
Rowell consent to showing us a human figure on the landscape of Yosemite,
and even when he does, the human experience is always a solitary one. "Only
by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart
of the wilderness," wrote Muir. "All other travel is mere dust and
hotels and baggage and clatter." Exactly here, of course, is the unspoken
irony of the whole enterprise--Rowell credits Muir with protecting Yosemite
from unrestrained development, but his photographs also remind us that the
Yosemite we see in these pages is a wholly different place than the hectic
tourist destination that it has become.
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