-My pictures concentrate on landscapes that lie
between the extremes of wilderness and metropolis.”
* Eric
Paddock
I moved to the West
because of spectacle: the mountains, their streams, the canyons
those streams cut, the summer flowers in high meadows. I stayed
because of the landscapes Eric Paddock shows in Belonging to the
West – what the book jacket calls “67 full-color photographs.”
Technically, they are “full color,” but the subject matter – sage
flats, mining towns whose tiny houses are perched on switchbacks,
trailer parks, eroding gullies – bleaches the color out of them.
These photos make my teeth ache with a hunger that is inexplicable
and irrational. When these scenes vanish from the West, when it
becomes “full color” everywhere and not just in the ski towns and
the discovered villages, then the West will no longer be worth
living in, any more than Disneyland is worth living
in.
Eric Paddock is curator of photography at the
Colorado Historical Society in Denver; his book is published by
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2715 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD
21218. $49.95 cloth, $29.95 paper, 109 pages, 66 color
photos.
* Ed
Marston
Moffat
County,
Colorado (top)
and
Penrose, Colorado. Phots
by
Eric Paddock.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Belonging to the West.
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