American Southwest: A People and Their Landscape

The American Southwest - Arizona, New Mexico, and the lower halves of Utah and Colorado - is a vast and relatively underpopulated space, dominated by earth and sky. Its majestic landscape of mountains, canyons, and dramatic rock formations exerts a profound influence on all who encounter it.
Essayist Michael Grant leads us on a fascinating tour from desert ranchlands to mountaintop mining towns, blending his own experiences into discussions of geologic and cultural history. He reminds us of the mighty turmoil that, over eons, pushed up mountains, drained off seas, and raised seabeds to the sky, allowing wind, ice, and water to scour and sculpt fantastic pinnacles and canyons. He imagines for us a primitive tribe standing in awe at the edge of the Grand Canyon, and relates his own, modern-day experience of floating in a luxurious houseboat on man-made Lake Powell - still overwhelmed by a canyon's silent grandeur. He visits with a rancher who remembers cowboy shootouts from his childhood while his cattle browse on desert scrub to become ideally lean "gourmet cattle for the new age." With Grant we revisit old U.S. Route 66, which so affected America's expansion into the Southwest. He takes us back even further, to the heyday of the mountain mining towns, to Fred Harvey's collaboration with the Santa Fe Railway, to Navajo trading posts, and to a remote Zuni ritual site.
It is the blending of past with present, of awesome landscape with human adjustments that makes the Southwest what it is today. But one thing has never changed, and that is the light. It remains the dominating factor in every Southwestern scene.
Tom Till captures that light in all its glorious aspects. His photographs constitute a remarkably self-contained portrait of the Southwest, as well as an inspired complement to Michael Grant's essays. In full-color photographs, Till offers magnificent vistas and tiny flowers; rain showers and snow-powdered ancient ruins; boulders and sand dunes; cowboys and antique buildings; and the amazing Southwestern light shining on rocky spires, churches, waterfalls, aspen, and cactus.
Till and Grant present indelible images of the American Southwest - where artists and tourists alike are continually tempted to slam on the brakes and stay forever.