Notes on a Shared Landscape: Making Sense of the American West

by David Bayles

In his best-selling Art and Fear , David Bayles (with Ted Orland) closely examined personal and autobiographical episodes in search of general truths about artmaking. Bayles now turns that same attention to his native West. When European Americans “discovered” the American West, they fell in love with the resplendent landscape. The love affair and its congenital flaws persists to this day. Bayles “. . . the question is why my people bungled our occupation of the West so badly when no one really wanted to, when there was every chance to get it right, when voices of caution were constantly raised, when what needed to be done was frequently obvious, and when, occasionally, we did get it right ( National Parks).” Notes on a Shared Landscape engages the issues that make the West the West—widely ranging over the autobiographical and the cultural, the ecological and the epistemological, the cow and the potato. This is an intensely personal book, and though the Western library is huge, there is not another book like it. Much of the text unfolds in Yellowstone, where Bayles In the Lamar valley of the Yellowstone, beaver gnaw the trunks of cottonwoods, elk browse their leaves. The shadows are long, even in summer. Even so, it is just another place. In it, just as elsewhere, we see the marks of our own hands faintly because we don’t have to know very much about the land we live in, because we are equally a part of and apart from nature, and because there is hardly any moment when humans are more delusional than when self recognition is required.

111 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

David Bayles is an accomplished photographer, author, workshop leader, and conservationist. He has studied with Ansel Adams and Brett Weston, among others, and has taught and written extensively in the arts for over thirty years.

Reviews

[Joy Liu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting look into a realistic perspective on colonialism and modern exploring especially in the west.

[Chu Qiao · Rating 5 out of 5]

lost past, lost future.
Who we are are always shaped by where you are
Your seeing is not the faculties of yours
Seeing , seemly the most objective act, is not internal, no passive: it is not a given. It is active manifestation of how the world work in your eyes.and what peace have you made with it and what does it all mean and what life all about and just exactly how do you live it. Seeing is existence. No more, no less. How we exist is shaped in part by how we see, and how we see is shaped in part by what there is to see. That in turn is shaped by what we as a society and as individuals do and think, by what we care about. There is no real boundary between seeing and knowing.

One consequence of knowing where you are is knowing when you leave.

[Annette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author, photographer / artist (studied with Ansel Adams & Brett Weston), former logger, and native Westerner, David Bayles provides an elegant autobiographical examination of the West. In a series of personal essays accompanied by his unique photographs, the author questions our views and our care and treatment of the lands. Within the essays, he distinguishes his literal view of the West from peoples' mythic views. (lj)

[Dave Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, the irony of living in a place you love and then loving it to death. We've done that to the West. Alas, death may come sooner than most of us would like if state and local entities get their hands on Federal land: Yellowstone National Tea Party Park. Aargh.