$45.00 U.S. (trade discount)
E-book TBD.
Hardcover
244 pages with 162 color and 4 black-and-white photographs by the author, 4 color maps, and 1 color historic postcard = 171
11.875″ x 9.5″ landscape
ISBN: 978–1–938086–95–3
Published December 2022
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
Published in association with the Center for the Study of Place.
Events and Exhibitions
March, 16, 2023
Book Signing and Exhibition “More than Scenery”
Regis University
Read an interview with the author in On Landscape 2024
by Janet L. Pritchard
with a foreword by Lucy R. Lippard
Winner of 2023 Silver Medal IPPY Award for Best Regional Book of Non-Fiction for the Mountain West
Janet Pritchard’s romance with the American West began with horseback riding, movies, and her father’s dreams of being a cowboy. When she started to spend adolescent summers in Wyoming during the 1960s, her world changed forever, as she fell under the spell of natural wonder in the shadow of the Grand Tetons. Only later did she recognize her feelings as a response to what nineteenth-century Romantics called the sublime.
A vintage 1914 picture postcard of Golden Gate Canyon by F. Jay Haynes inspired this project. When Pritchard turned it over and read the message—”I cannot describe the Yellowstone as the dictionary is only a book. It is more than scenery. In some places, it is so beautiful that the men take off their hats & the women are silent!”—she was back in a childhood place of wonder tempered by a lifetime of work as an artist and teacher in landscape photography.
Formed by fire and ice, embraced by a nation seeking an ancient past with a future as grand as the landscapes it inhabited, Yellowstone was established as the world’s first national park by an Act of Congress in 1872. One hundred fifty years later, the park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem continue to occupy an iconic role in the public imagination of Yellowstone as a place that is both real and ideal. Here, in this complex ecosystem where wild nature and culture meet, the complexities of our relationship to the natural world are revealed, unlike any other national park.
Yellowstone is truly unique, and each generation of visitors invests Yellowstone with ideas, beliefs, and values reflecting its historical moment. In More than Scenery: Yellowstone, an American Love Story, Janet Pritchard surveys these relationships with her captivating photographs and insightful text, and Lucy R. Lippard sets the table with her heartfelt introduction to the world’s romance with Yellowstone. This book shows why Yellowstone is so important to America and the world and how its landscapes reveal more than beautiful scenery.
About
About the Author
Janet L. Pritchard is a photographer and Professor of Photography at the University of Connecticut. Her photographs have appeared in FlakPhoto Projects, Fine Art Photography Daily, Fraction Magazine, LensCulture, Lenscratch, The Photo Review, and View Camera Magazine, among others. Her awards and fellowships include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography, Jay and Deborah Last Fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society, and a National Endowment for the Arts Summer Institute Fellowship at the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Her Artist-in-Residence awards include the Jentel Foundation, Millay Colony for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, and Vindolanda Trust, UK. Her artist Website is www.janetpritchard.com.
About the Contributor
Lucy R. Lippard is an activist, art critic, curator, and author of twenty-five books, including Pueblo Chico: Land and Lives in Galisteo since 1814 (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2020), Down Country: The Tano of Galisteo Basin, 1250–1782 (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2010), Undermining: A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West (The New Press, 2006), On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place (The New Press, 1999), and The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (The New Press, 1997).
Slide Show
Praise
“Janet Pritchard’s journey through time reveals the many layers of history, geography, and iconography associated with Yellowstone as a nature reserve, destination, and space of imagination. Through compelling photographs and archival research, Pritchard invites us to look beyond the scenery of America’s—and the world’s—first national park.”
—Liz Wells, Emeritus Professor in Photographic Culture, University of Plymouth, and author of Photography: A Critical Introduction
“Beyond the spectacle of one of America’s most popular national parks, Janet Pritchard becomes an intimate guide to Yellowstone as cultural icon and as a landscape with much to explore. Through remarkable photographs and illuminating texts, More than Scenery takes a deep dive into the overlooked details that make Yellowstone an authentic place of wonder.”
—Mark Klett, Regents Professor of Art, Arizona State University, and author of Seeing Time: Forty Years of Photographs
“Janet Pritchard’s More than Scenery is a visual love poem to Yellowstone National Park, a landscape she came to know well and care about deeply. Wandering among her intimate images of the park, its history, and its visitors is akin to taking a long, delicious drive along Yellowstone’s Grand Loop Road. Pritchard’s wonderful book finds every enchanting viewpoint along the way, and her photographs explore how nature, biography, memory, and our own human experiences of the park combine to make Yellowstone—the park and the greater ecosystem—a place like no other.”
—William Wyckoff, Professor of Geography, Montana State University, and author of How to Read the American West: A Field Guide and On the Road Again: Montana’s Changing Landscape
“More than Scenery offers an important new perspective on the meaning and value of Yellowstone. Anyone familiar with the place knows that it is not just the breathtaking Wonderland of popular understanding. It is that—perfectly breathtaking—but anyone who has lived there knows that Yellowstone is also a human place. With four million visitors a year, the common complaint is that the park is all too human, but Janet Pritchard sees how a balance has been struck there. That sounds like a compromise, as if making space for the human is just a way to allow the place to be paved some more, but Pritchard’s is the more sophisticated view that develops over time. She is not just a visitor; she has a long-running relationship with the place going back to childhood. She knows Yellowstone well enough to feel its pulse and appreciate that the place is big enough to make space for many versions of itself. The human and the wild can interact comfortably, which is as much a wonder as anything else.”
—Scott Herring, Continuing Lecturer in Writing, University of California, Davis, and author of Rough Trip through Yellowstone and Yellowstone’s Lost Legend: Uncle Billy Hofer, Renaissance Man of the Early Park
“More than Scenery is more than the usual photography book. Pritchard has worked long and hard to look at Yellowstone ‘from the vantage points of nature, culture, and history.’ She deconstructs the myth of Yellowstone even as she, like most of us, continues to be seduced by its extraordinary beauty. But the beauty is frankly mediated by human intervention, illuminating the social construction of wild nature out West. In a curious and clever way, the book becomes a topographic memoir, and the love story at its heart is a collective one, common to everyone who has been awestruck by Yellowstone. As revealed by Pritchard, the history of the park (once called ‘Wonderland’) is a microcosm of the nation’s confused approaches to nature.”
—Lucy R. Lippard, from “Romancing the West”
My Place
The conflict between here and there is a central tension in my life. During my first forty years, I spent half my life in the glaciated woods of the northeastern U.S. and the other half in the Rocky Mountain West while living in twenty-three different houses. Stepping foot in Wyoming as an adolescent changed my life. The immense skies, dramatic mountains, and sweeping vistas resonated with my soul. The sublime was real for me, and I kept finding ways to go back until I finally described myself as “geographically bilingual”—equally at home in each region.
For a time I settled in Colorado in order to be close to Wyoming, yet I never returned until I began my Yellowstone project. Later, when I moved to New Mexico for graduate school, the lack of water required an adjustment for me, but ended up succumbing also to the beauties of the desert. I saw benefits in each landscape, and my vocabulary of place and sense of self grew. Still, I envied people with close ties to a single place, one tied to family and where one could call up memories tied to terrain across generations—an experience I knew I’d never have.
The house I lived in the longest in my childhood sat on ten acres of land that shaped my imagination. The property was bounded by a brook, a stream, and farms. These spaces, once defined by fields and rotating crops, are now a golf club and housing development. When I was young, however, I could roam them at will. My best friend and I had many adventures. One of our favorite places was a small grove of young eastern white pines tucked away across the brook some distance from the house. We’d go down the big hill, through the allée of Buttonwoods we called “Lover’s Lane,” over a post and rail fence, through the woods, and across the brook, which meant jumping over two gaps in the gravity dam. No one remembered why the pond had been formed. Once we arrived, lights winds often whispered through the long-fingered needles filtering sunlight on a dense mat of fallen, yellowed needles that muffled the sounds of our movements; we had found a sacred grove.
My wife and I met while we were students in Boulder. A pattern of movement, west and east and west, unfolded over fifteen years. Back in Boulder, then in Denver, we started our family; we moved back east not long after I turned forty. The pull of my large, extended family outweighed the sublime with children in tow. After five years in Philadelphia, we moved to the quiet corner of northeast Connecticut where we have now lived for more than twenty years. It feels as much like home as any other place I’ve lived. My memories of raising three sons are tied to Colorado, Philadelphia, and Connecticut—a subset of my life. I recall the houses where our boys were born, each dog who chased balls in which yards, summer travels, winter storms, and the Christmases my mother spent with us in each of our homes before she passed away; it goes on. Our older boys have moved back to Colorado and our family ties there remain strong; we’ll never be entirely situated in one place or the other. The longing to be west when I’m east or vice versa continues, but now I understand: I, too, have memories across generations. They’re not located in one place; they’re located in the many places that have formed not only me but, most significantly, in my family.
Copyright © 2022 Janet Pritchard. All rights reserved.