Edges of the Experiment – The Making of the American Landscape
At the request of Fw:Books and under the heat of the 2014 summer I made numerous imaginary, armchair and late-night cinematic journeys into Monument Valley. What resulted is a lavishly illustrated essay on how that dusty and rocky land tucked away in a corner of Arizona and three other states did become iconic over the course of the 20th century. And writer and cinema enthusiast Felix van de Vorst contributed three short texts on how director John Ford has appropriated Monument Valley for his sweeping frontier film epics.
‘God’s Studio: The Iconization of Hostile and Ugly Land’ & ‘John Ford’s Monument Valley: 3 films’ have now been published in a wonderful double volume dedicated to the American landscape photographs by Marie-José Jongerius and the interactions between man and nature in the ongoing process of the “civilization” of the American West. The books have been designed and edited by Hans Gremmen. Raymond Frenken wrote all the texts accompanying Jongerius’s photographs and also delivered a nice essay on the desert music scene of southern California, around Joshua Tree National Park.
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