Drowned River: The Death and Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado, Rebecca Solnit, Mark Klett, Michael Brune
In Drowned River: The Death and Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado (Radius Books), Rebecca Solnit’s word flow between images by Mark Klett and Michael Brune to document the changes — foreseen, ignored, unexpected, welcomed — that this spectacular southwest landscape has undergone since the 1960s.
The heat (this week especially) comes right off the pages of this vast book. Its use of scale swells and narrows like the Colorado River to show bright, scorched landscapes and all of the details that lay in the cracks — flora, fauna, stone, litter and lost objects, reflections evaporating into the hot, orange air.
It can be difficult to see and read at times but does end with those glimmers of hope we so desperately crave. The final photographs are painted with a little more green.
“In the big picture, things were often disturbed and disturbing. On the small scale, they are sometimes what they had always been.”