$40.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover
208 pages with 1 book cover, 2 historic photos, and 35 graphite drawings and 67 photographs by the author (56 color and 11 black-and-white) = 105 illustrations
10.625″ x 8.5″ horizontal/landscape
ISBN: 978–1–960521-03-3
Published October 2024
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
Published in association with the
Center for the Study of Place.
Drawings, photographs, and stories by Gary Freeburg
2025 Next Generation Indy Book Award co-winner of the best book in the Travel/Travel Guide category!
The volcanoes on the Alaska Peninsula and the fifty-seven volcanoes that project into the Aleutian Islands form the northern rim of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Many are in Alaska’s national parks, monuments, and preserves. They continue to erupt, creating new Earth surfaces, and the deposits of lava, pumice, and ash ejected by these volcanoes create primeval ground: a true wilderness where few people on Earth other than volcanologists have traversed.
Gary Freeburg has wandered and lived among Alaska’s volcanoes for regular periods during the past three decades. The volcanoes he visits are alive and in some cases still steaming, and its lands are coarse and free of distraction: a vacuum of emptiness that embraces solitude and silence stirred only by the winds that blow and the rains that fall. The Earth surfaces that he walks are hard and largely barren of plant life, except where surfaces are shielded by the wind or are near water sources. There, new life returns in the form of lichen and tiny plants and insects and animals—bees, bear, fox, mayflies, and Alaskan hares—taking their rightful place in these vast, remote national parks, monuments, and preserves, reminding us that they are signs of hope that Earth will continue to evolve, regenerate, and renew itself long after we humans are gone.
Freeburg’s writings, photographs, and drawings reflect what it is like to seek solitude and live among Alaska’s wild volcanoes. His travels were mostly solo treks in which he was flown in with supplies, a camera, sketchbooks, and journal to share his thoughts and artistically render his experiences. Each day spent in Alaska’s volcanic wilderness affirmed the importance of this place for the author and those who can only dream of such a place. His book seems to explain: how fortunate it is to have magical places and national parks like Alaska’s volcanoes, how fortunate we are to be alive on this magnificent Earth.
About
About the Author
Gary Freeburg lived and worked in Alaska for twenty-five years and served as a professor of art at the University of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula College, where he directed the art program and served as the curator in the campus art gallery that now bears his name. He then became a professor of art and the director of Sawhill Gallery at James Madison University before retiring in 2018. Freeburg has been with and studied under renowned photographers and educators such as Ansel Adams, Oliver Gagliani, and John Schultz, and his photographs have been exhibited nationally and appeared in Under Northern Lights, Writers and Artists View the Alaskan Landscape and Looking North (University of Washington Press, 1998; 2000). He has received an Individual Artist Fellowship Grant from the Alaska State Council on the Arts, Anchorage; an honorary degree for his contribution to the visual arts from Alaska Pacific University, Anchorage; and an Art Educator of the Year Award in Higher Education from the Alaska Art Education Association. He was recognized by the Getty Center for Education in the Arts for his art advocacy work in Alaska and Washington, D.C., and a documentary film by George C. Johnson, An Artist’s Journey to the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes: The Photography of Gary Freeburg, serves as a capstone to Freeburg’s photographic work in the wilderness of Alaska. His previous book is The Valley of 10,000 Smokes: Revisiting Alaska’s Sublime (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2012).
Slide Show
Gary Freeburg has regularly explored Alaska’s wild volcanoes for nearly three decades—making unforgettable photography and evocative graphite drawings of his time in one of the world’s most remote wilderness areas. Even as his photographs are faithful renderings of the ever-changing landscape and atmosphere, they do not convey fully the tactile experiences of being in such grand but challenging conditions. Freeburg thus turns to drawings to convey how living in and among Alaska’s volcanoes physically and emotionally feels. The photographs and drawings thus complement each other in revealing the magic of this special place.
My Place
My wide-brimmed hat sits on the top shelf of a closet just inside the front door of my home in downtown Harrisonburg, Virginia. I use it on occasion during the winter, but it comes out in early spring and travels with me between Chesapeake Bay and Alaska during much of the summer and into late fall.
Harrisonburg is where I work as Director of the Sawhill Gallery at James Madison University. My home is located in the Old Town neighborhood in the heart of this burgeoning city of 50,000 people. Being a university town and living but three blocks from campus, I experience the energy associated with a campus of 20,000 students and the constant activity of artistic and scientific presentations and performances. It is a nourishing environment and a wonderful and most convenient place to live.
Having lived previously for twenty-five years in Alaska, my emotional attachment to the land is greater there than it is here for the beautiful Shenandoah Valley. When I travel to Alaska from Virginia to make new photographs of Alaska’s wilderness, I find the first breath of cool Alaskan air exhilarating and refreshing.
The photographic work I do in Alaska is brought back to my studio in Harrisonburg. The studio is a place for reflection on the work I did in America’s great north. But a few hours to the east is Chesapeake Bay, where I keep a sailboat. It also serves as a second out-of-the-way home for me, because the sailboat takes me to the most accessible of wilderness areas back east―the ocean―for long periods of solitude and directionless thinking.
Copyright © 2013 Gary Freeburg. All rights reserved.