Working in a library and being surrounded by printed materials, I am often drawn to the covers of books to help decide which book I will pick up and begin a new adventure with.
Being a photographer at heart, I am quick to reach for books that use photography to tell stories. These books are found in the photography section of the library, which highlights the work of published photographers, or are kept in the subject area that the photography is portraying, including marine life and regional areas of British Columbia. A sample:
Beneath Cold Seas: The Underwater Wilderness of the Pacific Northwest by David Hall is a visual delight and my current favourite book on photography. Hall is an award-winning underwater photographer, with work published in National Geographic, Smithsonian and Natural History magazines as well as 10 children's books in the Undersea Encounters series. In Beneath Cold Seas, Hall reveals a vibrant and multi-coloured world of marine life off our Pacific Coast, which is also home to the most diverse marine life of any cold-water ecosystem on the planet. Unless you are a scuba diver and have seen these underwater treasures, this book is a must for exposing the mysterious and beautiful fragile life in our local waters.
In The Sacred Headwaters: The Fight to Save the Stikine, Skeena and Nass, author Wade Davis uses photography by the International League of Conservation Photographers to showcase the remote and spectacular valley in northern British Columbia known to First Nations as the Sacred Headwaters. Davis is an anthropologist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence and, for the past 30 years, has lived seasonally at his family's fishing lodge in the upper Stikine, where he worked as a park ranger in his youth. In this book, Davis weaves eloquent text with full-page photographs of untouched natural wilderness, revealing his reverence for this region and his goal to take the viewer "to realms of cultural [and natural] splendour so great that we will understand, finally, their value to the world."
In Fred Herzog: Photographs we see an engaging collection of Herzog's colour Vancouver street photography, taken between 1953 and 1984. Many of these images are of Vancouver in the 1950s and '60s, providing an historical view that preserves the city in time. Although Herzog has a large photography collection that spans the past 50 years, it is within the last decade that his work has received major recognition, including an exhibition of his photography at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007. Having grown up in Vancouver, I am drawn to reflect on these photographs to recall my memories, and to consider what history still lives on in the buildings, signage and city neighbourhoods.
A Good Read is a column by Tri-City librarians that is published every Wednesday.
