Picture Stories by Stephen Alvarez

Chesapeake by Cameron Davidson

Just in time for your pre black Friday shopping here is a guest post by Cameron Davidson about his new book Chesapeake . I have long admired Davidson's photographs. He is one of the world's greatest aerial photographers (go to his site and be staggered by his talent). 

-Stephen Alvarez

Chesapeake, the book project has been a 20 plus year labor of love. Its foundation came about from a story I shot for National Geographic on the Great Blue Herons of Black Swamp Creek on Maryland's Patuxent River.  After a introductory flight over the rookery in an ancient and quite reliable Piper Cub, I fell in love with aerials.  I abandoned my dream of being a bird photographer for the Geographic and embraced the goal of a career centered on travel and shooting aerials.

Peter McBride: the Colorado River

One of the great things about photo festivals is the chance encounters with old friends. Yesterday morning I ran into Peter McBride at my favorite DC coffeehouse. He showed me the book he has been working on for the last 2 plus years. Pete's idea is simple, look at the Colorado River begining to end and follow the water. Most of it doen't make it to the sea.

The place to get the book is off his website (here). Be sure to look at the exelent videos he produced while shooting the book.

Stephen Alvarez

Sewanee, TN

Blind Descent by James Tabor

A friend sent me this interview with James M. Tabor author of Blind Descent (amazon here). Tabor has been getting some much deserved good press lately (on the Daily Show here, and npr here). Tabor frames the book as a race by two cave teams -one American, one Ukrainian- to find the deepest cave in the world. As I've said before only the American team viewed it as a race. 

To the Ukrainians who actually blew the doors off the world depth record, the American team was in a race by themselves, in the wrong place.

Still the book is a good read, buy it for the cover alone...

-Stephen Alvarez

Sewanee, TN

Joel Sartore Rare:Portraits of America's Endangered Species

Joel Sartore has a new book. Rare: Portraits of America's Endangered Species The book is just what it says, wonderful portraits of some of America's rarest animals. Below is what Joel has to say about the Whooping Crane.

 

Once overhunted, these magnificent national treasures are now carefully monitored to prevent their total annihilation.  Captive breeding and migration training have saved the whooping crane, but power lines along migration routes, an industrial shipping canal in their wintering marsh, and reduced genetic diversity still trouble the species.

The story behind the photo:

Joel Sartore Rare:Portraits of America's Endangered Species

buy the book from Amazon here Rare: Portraits of America's Endangered Species

Blind Descent book by James Tabor

 

An advance copy of James Tabor's new book Blind Descent arrived in the mail yesterday. It chronicles 2 great achievements of exploration the exploration of the Cheve cave system in Mexico and the 2+ kilometer deep Krubera cave in Abkhazia.

Tabor explains the exploration by looking at the two men who pioneered the work. Bill Stone (above) and Alexander Klimchouk couldn't be any more different and as the book explains, their expeditions were polar opposites. Stone's were fraught with personal infighting, death and intrigue. Klimchouck's hummed along like a machine.

Stanley Greene's Black Passport

 

Black Passport

Stanley Greene and Teun van der Heijden

Aperture 2010

Let me say two things right of the bat.

1, I’m no war photographer. I’ve worked in war zones and I’m no stranger to the thrill of photographing something that might well kill you. But as for shooting war for war? It is not my particular drug. It is, however, Stanley Greene’s drug of choice. He returns to it over and over, making his pictures but loosing a part of himself each time.

2, I don’t know Stanley Green.

But after spending some time with his new book Stanley Greene: Black Passport I feel like I do know Stanley. More than that, I feel like we’ve been out all night drinking and carousing and he has laid his soul bare in some late night/early morning booze and dope fueled intimacy.

That is what Greene and Tuen van der Heijden have done in this book, laid Stanley’s soul bare.

A Quick Note about The Americans from Pradip Malde

A Quick Note about The Americans and Robert Frank from Pradip Malde, Professor of Fine Arts at Sewanee, to compliment the 10 Photo Books of 2009 List. Be sure and check out Pradip’s evocative Haiti Portfolio. Pradip leads a documentary photography class there most summers. From Pradip:

Robert Frank's 'The Americans' has become one of several commentaries on American culture and politics that is insightful, cautionary, and almost prescient. Others that come to mind in this cluster are Alexis de Tocquevile's 'Democracy in America' (1835 and 1840) and Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road' (1951). Frank travelled across the USA for some two years during the mid-1950s, generating almost 30,000 exposures. The resulting edit of 83 photographs was published in the USA by Delpire Press in 1959. Fifty years on, Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Sarah Greenough, presents us with an incredible reconsideration of Frank's work. 'Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans - expanded edition' maps out the relationships between the creative processes of an artist and the culture of a nation, the tensions between expression and commodity, and the rigors of doing documentary work. All of this with essays and, most important, hundreds of richly reproduced archive images, work prints and contact sheets. This book, the expanded edition, should be issued with every new American passport.

 - Pradip Malde

(Buy The Americans)

 

[Note that 'Looking In' is also available in a more condensed version and is substantially different from the expanded edition.]

10 Photo Books of 2009

 
 

So many choices this year – so here’s the random 10. Frank, Eggleston, and Anderson were clearly trending among the picturati. (Thanks to all of you who graciously weighed in.) And yes Chris, Stephen still owes you a print…

 

National Geographic Image Collection Book

Check out some of the images on Lens.Blog (here). Or order the book $31.50 from Amazon HERE.

-Stephen Alvarez