Limited hardcover edition:
ISBN 978–1–938086–35–9
$75.00 (includes DVD) (short discount)
Softcover edition with flaps:
ISBN 978–1–938086–37–6
$35.00 U.S. (short discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
288 pages
126 color and 28 black-and-white illustrations, among them 117 original drawings, watercolors, and photographs by J. B. Jackson
9.5″ x 9.0″ landscape
Published in November 2015
Distributed by the University of Virginia Press
books.upress.edu
To purchase the DVD, contact Documentary Educational Resources: www.der.org.
Events and Exhibitions
October 15–17, 2015
PhotoPaysage / LandscapeRepresentation Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico
edited by Janet Mendelsohn and Chris Wilson
with drawings, watercolors, and photographs by J. B. Jackson
and essays and contributions by Chris Wilson, Janet Mendelsohn,
F. Douglas Adams, Bob Calo, Timothy Davis, Miguel Gandert, Peter Goin, Paul Groth, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, and Paul F. Starrs
A landmark book and DVD about J. B. Jackson and landscape studies.
J. B. (John Brinckerhoff) Jackson founded, edited, and published Landscape from 1951–1969, a magazine that changed the way everyone—including writers and scholars, planners and designers, artists and the general public—came to understand and interpret the everyday places that surround us and influence us in fundamental ways. Then, through his distinguished teaching career at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, and through his expansive array of seminal essays and influential books, Jackson further pioneered the advancement of “landscape studies,” whose connections today extend to more than a dozen academic, artistic, and professional fields.
Drawn to Landscape is the first book to present fully the many aspects of Jackson’s career. Including original essays by those who not only knew Jackson well, but also have carried his torch to new heights in their own work, the book sheds valuable light on Jackson’s life, oeuvre, influences, and many legacies. Also included are 126 color illustrations and twenty-eight black-and-white illustrations, among them 117 of Jackson’s original drawings, watercolors, and teaching slides.
J. B. Jackson redefined landscape not as scenery but as the historical record of human interactions with the environment, whether urban, rural, suburban, social, or wild. He taught us to pay attention to the often overlooked but defining features of our everyday world, whose varied landscapes are created by ordinary people going about their day-to-day lives. And he guided us, from the first issue of Landscape to his last lecture and publication, to look at the landscape like one reads a book. As he proclaimed, “We have but to learn how to read it.” This book helps show us the way.
About
About the Authors
Janet Mendelsohn taught film and still photography at Harvard University before becoming a documentary film maker with a focus on the environment. Her projects include filmes for the Conservation Foundation on changes in land and water use, documentaries for the PBS science series NOVA, as well as independent films about the arts, including Figure in a Landscape: Conversations with J. B. Jackson, with Claire Marino (1988) and J. B. Jackson and the American Landscape (2015). She lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.
Chris Wilson is the J. B. Jackson Chair of Cultural Landscape Studies at the University of New Mexico, where he developed its Historic Preservation and Regionalism Program. He is the author of many books, including La Tierra Amarilla: Its History, Architecture and Cultural Landscape (Museum of New Mexico Press, 1991), with David Kammer, which won the Antoinette Forrester Downing Award from the Society of Architectural Historians; The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (University of New Mexico Press, 1997), which received the Abbott Lowell Cummings Award from the Vernacular Architecture Forum; and Facing Southwest: The Life and Houses of John Gaw Meem (W. W. Norton, 2001), which sings the virtues of a leading 1930s modern regionalist. He and Paul Groth edited the field survey, Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson (University of California Press, 2003), and Wilson was the lead author and editor for the landmark study, The Plazas of New Mexico (Trinity University Press, 2011).
Slide Show
Chapel of San Antonio de Cieneguilla in La Cienega, New Mexico, 1982. From the Collection of Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz and used by permission. 
House, Black Dallas, [Texas], March 1987. [No slide number.] From the J. B. Jackson Pictorial Materials Collection (Wilson Collection), Center for Southwest Research and the School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and used by permission 
[New Mexico]. Photograph by Miguel Gandert, October 1985. 4-R2-12. From the J. B. Jackson Pictorial Materials Collection (Groth Collection), Center for Southwest Research and the School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and used by permission. 
Near San Isidro, New Mexico, August 22, 1990. From the J. B. Jackson Pictorial Materials Collection, Center for Southwest Research and the School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and used by permission. 
City Institutions, City Centers, and Urban Workplaces; Shopping centers, pedestrian malls. San Bruno, [California], February1971. 5-P-16. From the J. B. Jackson Pictorial Materials Collection (Wilson Collection), Center for Southwest Research and the School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and used by permission. 
Rural Institutions and Small Towns; Rural centers II. Auction, South Dakota, May 1976. 8-D-05. From the J. B. Jackson Pictorial Materials Collection (Groth Collection), Center for Southwest Research and the School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and used by permission. 
Two views of a tree and landscape in Dakar, Senegal, 1942. From the Collection of F. Douglas Adams and used by permission. 
Celebrations, Fairs, and Carnivals [rodeo in Cuba, New Mexico], 1972. [No slide number.] From the J. B. Jackson Pictorial Materials Collection (Wilson Collection), Center for Southwest Research and the School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and is used by permission. 
Roadside landscape in northern New Mexico, October 28, 1994. From the Collection of Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz and used by permission. 
Farms, General; Farmsteads II. American River Valley, [California], April 1970. 7-M(2)-08. From the J. B. Jackson Pictorial Materials Collection (Groth Collection), Center for Southwest Research and the School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and used by permission. 
Park in Luxembourg or, possibly, Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, 1944. From the Collection of F. Douglas Adams and used by permission. 
Recreation and Sports; Lawns, April 1971. 9-D-13. From the J. B. Jackson Pictorial Materials Collection (Groth Collection), Center for Southwest Research and the School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and used by permission.
Praise
“At last a tribute worthy of the man—J. B. Jackson, landscape scholar, historian, and moralist, whose virtue as author and human being is hard to capture, since, as author, he showed not only a fondness of, but an admiration for even parking lots and shopping malls and, as a human being, he, for all his friendliness and even affection toward “ordinary” people, could be brusque and even dismissive of all who showed pretentiousness or were mere followers of a fashionable trend. That Drawn to Landscape so brilliantly succeeds owes much to its perceptive authors, the video documentary (that is part of the limited hardcover edition), and, above all, to the dedication of its editors and publisher.”
—Yi-Fu Tuan, Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and British Academy of Arts and Sciences, and author of more than twenty books, including The Last Launch: Messages in the Bottle and Humanist Geography: An Individual’s Search for Meaning
“The editors of Drawn to Landscape have marshaled a work as rich and robust as the ‘vernacular landscape’ that J. B. Jackson cherished and about which he spent a lifetime sharing with others—especially its meaning and value—so that we might see our common humanity when we learn how to look. The scope and majesty of this collection of Jacksonian ‘data,’ like Jackson’s decades of essays, reveals just how much meaning one can make of everyday things. The book is a tour de force.”
—Joseph S. Wood, Provost of the University of Baltimore and author of The New England Village
“Just as J. B. Jackson opened our eyes to the riches of the ordinary landscape around us, this volume, through the stories and images from those who knew him well, opens our eyes to the man behind the compelling essays, photographs, watercolors, and drawings of his beloved landscape.”
—Craig E. Colten, Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography at Louisiana State University and the author and editor of numerous books, including Southern Waters: The Limits to Abundance and An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature, which won the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize of the American Association of Geographers
ways, he returned landscape to its Dutch roots: more than a view, it is a place shaped through the interaction of nature and culture. And, as Drawn to Landscape illustrates, Jackson read and interpreted landscapes with a special set of eyes. A master essayist, Jackson also possessed a great acumen in drawing, painting, and photographing the landscapes of everyday life, which this book’s many illustrations display. The raw beauty of Jackson’s drawings and watercolors and the clarity of his photographs complement and enhance his prescient prose. Drawn to Landscape is a wonderful book that makes a really significant contribution, presenting firsthand insights into Jackson’s multifaceted, revelatory work.”
—Frederick R. Steiner, Dean, School of Architecture at the University of Texas, Austin, and author and editor of more than a dozen books, including Human Ecology: Following Nature’s Lead and The Living Landscape: An Ecological Approach to Landscape Planning
“In publishing Drawn to Landscape, George F. Thompson has produced an enduring summary of J. B. Jackson’s extraordinary work and life. This book gives us insight into Jackson’s singular world, chiefly with the help of his drawings, watercolors, and photographs. Drawn to Landscape shows us why “Mr. Jackson” refused to allow acolytes to follow closely in his footsteps, forcing us, instead, to rely on our own eyes, to develop our own precepts. ‘What good would it do,’ he asked, ‘to turn my words into tropes? Add something, don’t repeat what’s already there!'”
—John W. Sinton, Emeritus Professor of Environmental Studies at Stockton University and Adjunct Professor of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and co-author of Water, Earth, and Fire: Land Use and Environmental Planning in the New Jersey Pine Barrens
“This wonderful book, Drawn to Landscape, is an intellectual biography of Mr. J. B. Jackson, one of America’s most insightful observers of the ways people create living landscapes by drawing ideas and inspiration from their cultures and environments. Mr. Jackson founded and for many years edited the journal Landscape. This journal, together with Mr. Jackson’s other essays, books, sketches, watercolors, and photographs, profoundly influenced popular writing and scholarly research on landscape topics across a broad range of disciplines.
“Recorded and written by colleagues who knew him best, this book offers penetrating insights into how Mr. Jackson taught himself to see and think about landscape and how he came to understand people and their engagement in the process of a landscape’s construction. Mr. Jackson celebrated the vernacular landscape, in part because he was sympathetic to those aspects of life that were egalitarian and unregulated and in part because common things were not stilted by studied design principles and marketing psychology but honestly reflected peoples’ values and priorities.
“As an ever-curious traveler, Mr. Jackson gathered information and insights through informal interviews with local people and synthesized his observations through notes, sketches, watercolors, and photography. This book reproduces many of his photographs and artwork giving the reader the rare privilege of seeing landscape through his skilled hand and insightful mind. Readers of this book and present and future students of landscape are indebted to the editors, contributors, and publisher for this masterful commentary on Mr. Jackson’s experiences and the insights the book provides into the development of a master observer and chronicler of the American scene.”
—Karl Raitz, Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky, Member (1993–2012) of the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize Committee of the American Association of Geographers, and author and editor of numerous books, including The National Road (two volumes) and The Theater of Sport
“Drawn to Landscape is a superb tribute to a man who has profoundly affected thinking in a range of disciplines. Brinck Jackson’s stunning and powerful sketches and his broad scope of documentation with color slides are vividly portrayed as a telling embodiment of an unusually acute and innovative mind. These images and those he produced for Landscape magazine are given a revealing context by a group of distinguished scholars. The contents are engrossing for those of us fortunate enough to have known Jackson and for anyone with a serious interest in the shaping of the environment. Drawn to Landscape is essential reading.”
—Richard Longstreth, Professor of American Studies, George Washington University, and the author of numerous acclaimed books, including The American Department Store Transformed, Road Trip: Roadside America, from Custard’s Last Stand to the Wigwam Restaurant, and Looking beyond the Icons: Midcentury Architecture, Landscape, and Urbanism