This color-saturated collection of iconic Southwest scenes, including Bryce Canyon, the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Navajoland, Zion National Park and more, is paralyzingly gorgeous. The images are old-school technology — hand-tinted photographs sandwiched between two pieces of glass — that make the latest digital photographs look sterile in comparison.
The photographer is Ansel F. Hall, the National Park Service’s first chief naturalist. From 1933 to 1937, as leader of the Park Service’s field division, he led the Rainbow Bridge-Monument Valley expedition, a mapping and scientific exploration of more than 3,000 square miles from northern Arizona to southern Utah.
Hall documented the expedition with photographs that translate the vast landscapes and intricate canyons, and capture Navajo cowboys and shepherds, along with the first cautious tourists at the new Grand Canyon National Park.
Hall’s images were tinted by artists who were expert if not always accurate. Many of them were East Coast residents who never visited the Southwest.
Instead, working from sometimes sketchy descriptions of each image, the artists often relied on their imaginations to color the land and the people.
A lantern slide of a Navajo family shows a baby swaddled in blankets that are pink and blue — two colors that traditional Navajo would not have used at that time. A river was painted on the bone-dry floor of Bryce Canyon, and an artist added some nonexistent land formations to Hall’s photograph of Grand View Point at the Grand Canyon.
Visually, that artistic license only underscores the slightly surreal quality that emanates from nearly every image. A photograph of three Navajo men on horseback possesses a tranquil timelessness.
In the image of tourists crowded on Grand View Point, human fragility contrasts with the Grand Canyon’s enormous scope. A child’s joy is almost palpable in Hall’s portrait of a young Navajo girl holding a goat kid.
You could frame almost any image in “Landscapes on Glass,” and it would hold its own hung alongside other art. It’s that singular and splendid.
Here’s the most astonishing story: About 80 of the images in this book came from a small locked suitcase the size of a toaster. For years, that suitcase was tucked among a haphazard clutter of boxes and envelopes that made its way through the Hall family.
Somehow, the suitcase key survived. Author Jack Turner, grandson of Ansel Hall, discovered the suitcase contents as he was going through an uncle’s possessions, a find as tremendous as anything uncovered during the Rainbow Bridge-Monument Valley expedition.
NONFICTION
Landscapes on Glass: Lantern Slides for the Rainbow Bridge-Monument Valley Expedition, by Jack Turner, $19.95
