George Fiske, Yosemite Photographer [first edition]

Dust jacket notes: "George Fiske, Yosemite's first resident photographer, receives long-overdue attention in this well-illustrated volume. Fiske assumes a much-deserved prominence in nineteenth-century western photography with the publication of this collection of images and accompanying text. Ansel Adams has called Fiske 'a top interpretive photographer' and has said: 'I really can't get excited at Watkins and Muybridge -- I do get excited at Fiske. The views presented here, primarily from the 1870s and 1880s, represent a selection of his work in boh Yosemite and Big Trees, where Fiske as a resident had the freedom, and clearly the temperament, to pursue the transitory as well as the monumental aspects of the park. Returning season after season to certain viewpoints or following with his camera the progression of a storm or sunset, Fiske recorded the drama of Yosemite that no previous photographer had captured. Particularly fascinated by the area in winter, he made a spectacular series of pictures of Yosemite's famous waterfalls frozen in cascades of ice. Fiske was a sensitive observer of nature whose home happened to be what many early visitors called the meeting place of heaven and earth: Yosemite Valley. The eighty images in this book have been reproduced using the duotone process. This process helps to bring out the original colors of the emulsions used in that time, which varied from sepia to near purple, and it aids in capturing the original spirit of Fiske's work."