As most of you know, I've often knocked landscape photography as being inferior to painting, and more than once I've argued with Brooks Jensen's opinions in LensWork about what constitutes art, but here's something I'll say that's intensely positive about both landscape and Brooks's choice in picking Chuck Kimmerle's work for a book in his monograph series:
I don't know how many of you old timers remember Chuck. I just checked and found that the last time Chuck was active on LuLa was August 11, 2016, and the last post by Chuck I can find was from September 11, 2012. Chuck used to post some pretty wonderful stuff on LuLa, a lot of it landscape from North Dakota -- landscape with which I'm intimately familiar after driving over it and flying a bush plane, a Beaver, over it for many years in the fifties.
But I'll tell you this: If you're even remotely interested in what photography actually can do with landscape, you need Lenswork Monograph Series 10, Peripheral Vision, which just landed in my mailbox -- stuffed in sideways by the U.S. Postal "Service" so that the back of the book is broken. But the broken back takes nothing away from the photographs. One of the great things about Brooks Jensen's publications is that he spares nothing to produce some of the very best black and white reproductions you'll find anywhere.
In any case, I'll tell you that Peripheral Vision is the equivalent of the finest music or the finest poetry. It actually brought tears to my eyes. I've written before about what art is: something that produces a transcendental experience in the viewer or listener. This work is Art! Oh, and besides landscape it also includes some very fine wabi sabi from the prairies.
Bravo, Chuck! and bravo, Brooks. Thank you.