Photography

The companion book to Jeff Johnson's film about retracing the 1968 journey of Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia. Part surf trip, part climbing expedition, part environmental reckoning. Johnson sails, hitchhikes, and climbs his way to the edge of the world — and finds it being sold off piece by piece.

Richard Olsen's photographic history of surfing's most creative era — the shortboard revolution, the North Shore, the counterculture years when surfing was both a sport and a philosophy. The images alone justify the book.

Huw Lewis-Jones presents the photographs from Wally Herbert's 1968-69 crossing of the Arctic Ocean by dog sled — the last great journey of polar exploration. The images of ice, light, and endurance are extraordinary.

Ira Spring's memoir of a lifetime spent photographing the Pacific Northwest mountains. Spring was the most prolific outdoor photographer in Washington state history, and his images defined what the Cascades looked like in the American imagination.

If anyone can transport us into the soul of the White Continent, it’s photographer Sebastian Copeland. A professional polar explorer, Copeland has made several human-powered expeditions in frozen extremes, including the first transcontinental crossing of Antarctica from east to west via two of its poles, traveling on skis with kites for twenty-five hundred miles. Drawing from his on-foot experiences as well as seasons on a scientific research icebreaker, Antarctica: The Waking Giant is more than a decade in the making, and Copeland ground-truthed his pictures the hard way: breaking ribs, losing parts of his toes to frostbite, scuba diving under icebergs. The book holds one hundred fifty staggering photographs, from the vast, otherworldly interior to the wildlife-rich coasts, where whales break the surface and migrating birds and penguins mob the shorelines. In our rapidly changing, melting world, Copeland’s work is both celebration and warning, a potent reminder that no matter the distance, we are all in this together.

Chris Burkard's photography book documenting glaciers and the landscapes they've shaped — Iceland, Patagonia, the Alps, Alaska. The images are monumental. The subtext is elegiac: this is what's disappearing.

Zack Klein's collection of photographs of cabins, shelters, and hideaways in wild places around the world. No text to speak of — just image after image of small structures in big landscapes. The architectural equivalent of a deep breath.

Outer Hebrides. Marshall Islands. Haida Gwaii. Tanzania. Vanuatu. Madagascar. Russia. Oregon-based writer Michael Kew heeds the siren song of hard-to-reach locales as few do, and his book Crossings pulls together thirty-five true stories earned from a decade of global surf travel. 400+ pages might seem daunting, but Kew, who’s been likened to Paul Theroux and Jack Kerouac, writes with such an uncanny ear for people and places even non-surfers will be stricken with wanderlust: “Peering into the flames, I wedged my elbows comfortably between driftwood scree, shoes stirring the coarse, gray beach sand. Opposite the fire pit, through the torquing yellows and oranges, sat new friend Roderic: Burly, stubble-faced and densely clothed, alternating between beer and cigarette, he looked more like a typical commercial fisherman than surfer. Yet this was no typical surfscape.” Real adventure travel—the kind that isn’t comfortable, safe, or easily consumed—reminds us that while the world can seem small at times, it remains a very, very big place.

Chris Burkard's photography of remote surf breaks in Iceland, Norway, the Faroe Islands, and other places where the water is cold enough to kill you. The images are stunning — empty lineups, volcanic coastlines, surfers as small figures in enormous landscapes.

Polar explorer, historian, professor, and writer Huw Lewis-Jones is so prolific you will be forgiven for thinking there are two of him. In 2010, he published this book, an admiring sweep of ocean pioneers, along with a similar, companion book of mountain folks called Mountain Heros: Portraits of Adventure. Face to Face honors modern water people like surfer Kelly Slater and swimmer Lynne Cox while also plucking historical badasses from obscurity, like beloved Sir Thomas Lipton, who lost the America’s Cup five times. 500 words or so of each person’s biography are interspersed with intimate and action-oriented portraits, and Lewis-Jones’s British perspective brings a much more worldly array of personalities than you’d get from an American author. Flip through or plunging dive—either way, you’ll come away longing for the briny deep.

Gestalten's photographic survey of cabins, treehouses, and hideaways around the world. Architecture as escape — each structure a small argument for simplicity and solitude.

More from Gestalten's shelter obsession — tiny hotels, micro-cabins, and weekend retreats designed to disappear into the landscape. The photographs do the talking.

Chris Burkard's photography of surfing at the extremes — Arctic breaks, remote Pacific islands, storm swells in Iceland. The images are enormous and cold and beautiful.

Gestalten's guide to van life — the rigs, the routes, the people who traded addresses for odometers. Photography-driven, aspirational, and honest enough to include the parking lots.

Huw Lewis-Jones's visual history of Antarctic exploration — the maps, photographs, paintings, and artifacts of the heroic age and beyond.

Huw Lewis-Jones's visual portraits of mountaineers — the faces behind the expeditions. Photography and biography combined.

Gestalten's van life compendium — the rigs, the roads, the aesthetic of living out of a vehicle. Coffee-table format, wanderlust content.

On the Run is yet another hardcover, stitch-bound delight from Berlin-based publisher Gestalten, a book that feels as good to hold as it is to read, though no one’s judging if you just want to look at the photos. Inside are runners from a wide range of backgrounds and abilities, including profiles of Mimi Anderson, a fifty-seven-year-old mother of three who holds world records in endurance running; Justin Gallegos, the first professional athlete with cerebral palsy; and Brazil’s Ghetto Run Crew, an urban club taking back Rio de Janeiro’s dangerous streets one step at a time. Adding to the stoke are daydream-worthy descriptions of twenty-five marathons and trail runs, from Greece’s Athens Authentic Marathon to California’s Badwater 135 in Death Valley. Spanning the individual and universal in radiant images and stories, On the Run is two-hundred-and-fifty-some pages of runner’s sweet, sweet high, a celebration of how much putting one foot in front of the other can do for the human spirit.

Gestalten's collection of extraordinary lodgings in extraordinary places — treehouses, ice hotels, desert camps, and cliff dwellings. Aspiration as architecture.

Gestalten's survey of floating architecture — houseboats, sailing vessels, and structures built on or over water. The aesthetic of life afloat.

More Gestalten shelter photography — cabins, sheds, and retreats designed to minimize the boundary between inside and outside.

Gestalten's photography of sailing — blue water, wooden hulls, and the geometry of canvas and wind.

The history and culture of women's surfing — from the Hawaiian queens to the modern shortboard era. Photography, essays, and profiles of the women who refused to sit on the beach.

Photography and profiles of women surfers around the world — the culture, the style, the waves. A visual celebration of female surfing without apology or qualification.

Black-and-white portraits of surfers — faces weathered by salt and sun. Vanfleteren photographs surfers the way he photographs anyone: with unflinching intimacy. The ocean is implied but never shown.

Burkard's photography of surfing the California coast — from the Oregon border to the Mexican border, every break along the way.

The 1953 expedition in photographs — the images that defined Everest in the public imagination. Hillary, Tenzing, the South Col, and the summit ridge as they looked when no one had been there before.

Photographs from the 1958 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition — the crossing Shackleton died trying to complete. Hillary drove tractors to the South Pole; Fuchs crossed the continent. The images of ice and machinery are surreal.

The science and politics of grizzly conservation, distilled from decades of fieldwork and advocacy. Peacock and Louisa Willcox make the case that the bear's fate and ours are inseparable.

A beautiful, comprehensive guide to the culture and practice of fly fishing — technique, gear, destinations, and the philosophy that makes it more than a hobby.

Marc Andreini shapes surfboards in Santa Barbara the way his mentors did — by hand, from foam and fiberglass, one at a time. A collage of stories from a community built around craft and waves.

Fedarko and photographer Pete McBride hiked the entire length of the Grand Canyon — 750 miles through one of the most difficult landscapes in North America. The photographs are staggering. The text argues that the canyon is under threat from development, and the argument is convincing.

A photographic account of a PCT thru-hike — the landscapes rendered in large-format images that capture the scale of walking from Mexico to Canada.

Long-distance trails and walks around the world, curated and photographed. The paths less traveled — not the famous thru-hikes but the ones you've never heard of.

More Gestalten shelter architecture — remote cabins, off-grid hideaways, and the buildings people construct when they want to disappear.

Gestalten on mobile architecture — vans, tiny houses, modular shelters, and the people who chose impermanence as a lifestyle.

Longtime National Geographic photographer David Doubilet has spent more than twenty-seven thousand hours underwater, often in pursuit of the images that have become synonymous with his name: over/unders, above and belows, or, as he calls them, half-and-halfs. Enabled by domed water housings, this technique offers the ability to be in two environments at once, and his first major book in twenty years, Two Worlds: Above and Below the Sea, shows those environments to be stunning in their beauty and fragile beyond compare. A whale shark yawns below fishermen, hoping for a krill handout. In the Caymans, a stingray glides as gracefully as the sailboat above. Tiny and vulnerable, a loggerhead turtle hatchling shelters in tangled golden sargassum. Like many photojournalists, the New York native began as a documentarian and was forged a conservationist by the changing planet. Two Worlds offers one hundred twenty-eight pages of lushly printed photographs, an afterward by astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan, and Doubilet’s well-earned and plainspoken message: Take a look at all this, and act.

If you thought the last wisp of van life soul had long since sputtered out, this new hardcover could convince you otherwise. As the guy behind the #vanlife hashtag, Foster Huntington knows all about four-wheeled labor-of-loves, and this overstuffed book showcases hundreds of crowd-sourced photographs he’s collected over the years. It features thoughtful interviews with van dwellers—how much they spent; the realities of gas mileage and engine maintenance; where they make space for surfboards, dogs, bookshelves, guitars, and dirt bikes. And from Australia to France to Michigan, there are shots of custom campers, Vanagons, Sprinters, and school buses, each with their own hard-earned style and affectionately named: Gigi, Chewy, Greta, Hayduke, Walter, The Bunkhouse Road-Tripper. You’ll spend less time worrying if adventure has lost its purity and more getting stoked by this ode to the art of a well-stocked vehicle and its promise of open horizons.

Photography from America's great trails — the PCT, the AT, the CDT, and the trails nobody's heard of. Honan has walked more miles than most people drive.

Long-distance trails around the world, photographed and mapped. The global version of the hiking life.

A chef's love letter to the landscape and food of Newfoundland — wild game, foraged plants, and the connection between cooking and the land the ingredients come from.

Gestalten's exploration of hunting, foraging, and gathering cultures around the world. The oldest human relationship with the land, still practiced.

The illustrated autobiography — Thesiger's life in photographs and text. The deserts, the marshes, the mountains, and the people he traveled with.