100 Books Like Appalachian Wilderness

I have seen many photos of trees over the years, but these unique photos by Robert Adams of cottonwoods near his home in Colorado are poetic and lyrical.

They make the viewer feel the trees are almost speaking back with messages both haunting and affirming.

I have long been an admirer of Jim Brandenburg's nature photography. This is his magnum opus, in which he raised the bar by only exposing one photographic frame each day for the 90 days of autumn. The results are spectacular.

I first learned the techniques of nature photography from the Ansel Adams 5-book series. Adams offers great insights into how to best approach photographing difficult aspects of nature (including forests) in all weather and light conditions.

I found this guidebook the best for identifying species and explaining their characteristics within a forest. Knowing the species improved my forest photgraphy greatly.

My memories of childhood are of white winters and deep snowfalls. Like anyone in a perfect snowstorm, I have often looked at the flakes on the shoulders and sleeves of my coat and wished I could preserve that perfect crystal. I also wondered if the saying was true—that no two snowflakes are alike—and how anyone could possibly know.

I had no idea as a child that a Vermont farmer, Wilson Bentley, studied and photographed snowflakes for years, leading to discoveries about these six-sided, fleeting jewels. In Snowflake Bentley (another Caldecott recipient), Jacqueline Martin introduces us to a time “In the days when farmers worked with ox and sled,” and a boy “who loved snow more than anything else in the world.” A fascinating, educational,  and true story to explore.

Ray Atkeson was one of the premiere ski photographers of the early days of skiing, although he continued to produce photos from the 1920s all the way into the 1990s. His photos were primarily in black and white and can easily be compared to the brilliant nature photography of Ansel Adams. My mother, herself a ski pioneer, who became the first female to certify as an instructor in California, modeled for Atkeson in the 1940s. This book is a compilation of some of the finest ski photos ever put together.

During my time in India, I met some amazing women scientists. The Brahmaputra is one of the world's largest branching rivers, with multi-branched channels that branch and merge to form a distinctive branching pattern. It is home to temporary islands, and the flow of the water exhibits rapid periodic fluctuations between seasons.

Just as the water of the Brahmaputra has to navigate many obstacles from the river's source to the sea, women scientists in India face many obstacles in their work and personal lives. This book documents and illustrates the beauty of science and the importance of involving more women in science worldwide to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and reduce the multitude of contemporary socio-environmental problems, using India as an example.

When the Hungarian-French photographer Brassai arrived in Paris in 1924, he taught himself French by reading Proust. As a photographer, he was fascinated by a similarity between his own impulse to make pictures and how the novelist used the photographic process as a metaphor for establishing or obscuring his character’s inner and outer worlds, as if both he and Proust were developing images in their respective darkrooms. Proust, Brassai saw, “used his own body as an ultra-sensitive plate, managing to capture and register thousands of impressions.” He was like a reporter with a camera—sometimes a portraitist, a landscapist, and, “sometimes Proust rivals the paparazzi.”

The Civil War was the first conflict in history to leave a detailed photographic record, and no one did it better than Mathew Brady. More than ten thousand war images are attributed to his studio and he did iconic portraits of Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, Walt Whitman, Horace Greeley, and other celebrities.

Today, artificial intelligence, iPhones, and streaming video are remaking our world. But back in the 1850s, photography was the latest technology. It soon became so affordable that soldiers on both sides of the struggle sent a visually accurate memento to loved ones back home before they marched into battle. 

This book is a lively, questioning, and comprehensive survey of American photography, from its beginnings to the present. It analyzes achievements in each of the genres, from portraiture, through landscape, to documentary, fashion, etc. It treats individual photographic artists, from Avedon to Weegee, from the views of New York taken by Berenice Abbott to J.T. Zealy’s likenesses of enslaved Africans. American Photography is always concerned to underscore what photographs have to tell us about major aspects of American culture: race and ethnicity, gender and identity, business and technology, religion, and region. It also has numerous well-reproduced images; illuminating sidebars and boxes on such topics as the daguerreotype or picture magazines; a helpful timeline; and notes on further reading and viewing. The book was expanded and retitled as Photography in America in 2015, but the first edition still holds up.