Wilderness
Debra Bloomfield engaged for five years on a photographic project in the wilderness. After photographing the desert in Four Corners and the ocean in Still, she has moved on in this new book to the forest.
Her photographs do not describe a particular place. She does not catalog the elements that add up to wilderness. She does not show each detail she observed or convey all the information she learned while she was there. Instead, her photographs and soundscapes bring us to the experience of wilderness.
A CD is an integral part of this book, allowing the reader to share the photographer’s journey of hearing the call of birds overhead, the crunch of snow underfoot, and the hum of a ferry’s engine.
In Wilderness, two former UNM authors have joined in a collaboration that began over a cup of coffee and their mutual passion for wilderness.
Bloomfield has created a powerful message through imagery. For wilderness to continue to exist, it must remain wild.
The images [Bloomfield] captured…express something essential to the idea of wilderness as it was first articulated in the 1964 Wilderness Act: a landscape that is untrammeled, self-willed, and self-possessed.
Bloomfield’s photos—of glistening water, of islands rising out of estuaries, of thick stands of trees—are …atmospheric. They’re lovely and poetic, but they do not so much evoke a specific place as they conjure up a universal wilderness.
The photographs collected in Wilderness offer a unique and genuinely personal perspective on the nooks and panoramas of those wild places—a puzzle of sky caught through a close-up tangle of leafless branches; the line where a streak of dark trees cuts a sudden edge into a clearing. The rawness and intimacy of the images lend them an emotional, meditative quality, reminding viewers of our own unexpected, astonishing glimpses of nature.
Debra Bloomfield's poetic large-scale color photographs are included in the collections of the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Phoenix Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the George Eastman House, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Terry Tempest Williams, one of the nation’s leading environmental writers, is the author most recently of When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice.
