Appreciation for the mountains or seashore comes easily. Their beauty is overt, abundant and unavoidable.
The Great Plains, on the other hand, don’t reveal their treasures easily. They can be reticent, even taciturn, depending on visitors to look and then patiently look again and again.
The flyover crowd sees only sameness. But willing viewers can begin to discern the austere, penetrating beauty of this territory’s vast openness, where differences are signaled subtlely and quietly.
This is the world evoked in “West of Last Chance,” a collaboration between Texas photographer Peter Brown and Colorado novelist Kent Haruf. They met in 1999 and quickly discovered their shared devotion to the Great Plains.
The book, which consists of more 140 color plates and texts ranging from a couple of sentences to page-long short stories, is rewarding enough in its way, and it will no doubt achieve popular success, especially as a holiday gift.
But it also can be frustratingly confounding. The names of the towns where the photos were taken, for example, are listed in the back by page number, so the reader has to constantly flip back and forth. Is the suggestion that these places are all in some way interchangeable?
At the same time, what Brown and Haruf were trying to achieve is never clear. More than anything else, the book, with its many images of fading signs and abandoned buildings, comes off as a kind of nostalgic ode to a time that has all but disappeared. But is that the point?
The only attempt at explanation comes in a short afterword, in which Haruf vaguely asserts that the two collaborators wanted to present “a view of the plains, in a manner and a form, that had not been done before.”
It is a questionable claim, given this project’s many antecedents, ranging from Dorothea Lange’s famous documentation of rural America in the Depression to Robert Adams’ collections of photographs of Colorado and other parts of the West beginning in the 1970s.
Perhaps most relevant are the 1930s and ’40s books by noted novelist and photgrapher Wright Morris, which similarly combined words and text. If not exclusively focused on the Great Plains, much of his subject matter was nonetheless strikingly similar.
Brown’s photographs are a curious mixture of landscapes, both pure views of the land and others populated with ghostly evidence of human occupation; vernacular scenes of towns and roadside businesses, and the least successful — posed portraits of current inhabitants that seem forced.
From early in the 20th century through the present, many famous and not-so-famous photographers, ranging from Marion Post Wolcott and Laura Glipin to Gus Foster, Stuart Klipper and John Spence, have evoked the elusive essence of the Great Plains.
While most of Brown’s images are solid and well-composed, they are not especially distinctive and do little to expand this rich existing visual archive. John Vachon’s “Grazing Land” (1938), for example, a view of a roadside sign at the edge of an open field in Kansas, would fit right into this book if it were in color.
Haruf, who is best known for his books “Eventide” and “Plainsong,” is also walking well-trod ground. His contributions here add little that is particularly original. He has assembled an odd mix of jokes, anecdotes, observations and historical tales — some that read like couplets, others taking the form of succinct short stories, ambiguously blurring fiction and nonfiction. Apparently, he intended these varied writings to come together in a loose, idiomatic whole, but they don’t.
Romance also meets realism in “William Matthews: Working the West,” which chronicles a very different facet of the West — the still-vibrant ranching world of cowboys, who carry on a proud tradition of branding, roundups and other venerable duties.
Annie Proulx, author of “The Shipping News” and other novels, has penned a short look at the Colorado artist’s life and artistic philosophy, and Matthews adds a few explanatory texts, but the emphasis is squarely on his vibrant watercolors.
Following in the footsteps of such early Western artists as Karl Bodmer and Alfred Jacob Miller, Matthews uses the accessible if tricky medium of watercolor to create a virtuosic, in-the-moment look at a slice of still-surviving Western heritage.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
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Nonfiction
William Matthews: Working the West, Watercolors by William Matthews, text by Annie Proulx, $50
Nonfiction
West of Last Chance, Photography by Peter Brown, text by Kent Haruf, $49.95
