Park Place: Out West — David Heberlein. Published by George F Thompson Publishing.
Heberlein's photographs of people experiencing, viewing, photographing, and existing within the National Parks provide a useful depiction of how the parks have been consumed over the past three decades. The black-and-white photographs show access roads, protective barriers, boardwalks, didactic panels, picnic tables, and instructive displays as key components of how we experience American parklands. We also see people — and appropriately so, for few of us will experience the parks without the company of other park tourists. The parks, and wilderness spaces as an idea and an ideal, continue to be discussed and considered while issues such as Indigenous knowledge systems, global warming, equity and inclusion, and federal resource distribution raise new questions about how people relate to the landscape. This book allows readers to survey the grandeur and the mundane, the view and the way it has been defined for viewers. For those whose families trekked to the parks, the pictures may feel familiar. To those for whom the parks have not felt welcoming, it is a chance to see what can be found there. For all of us, these photographs are part of a vast record of how our national lands have looked and they enter a larger dialogue that is likely to continue in words and images for many years to come.
Dr. Rebecca Senf is Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. Her B.A. in Art History is from the University of Arizona; her M.A. and Ph.D. were awarded by Boston University. In 2012, her book Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe was released by University of California Press; in 2017, her book To Be Thirteen, showcasing the work of Betsy Schneider, was published by Radius Press and Phoenix Art Museum. Senf is an Ansel Adams scholar, and in 2020 published a book on Ansel Adams’s early years, called Making a Photographer, co-published by the CCP and Yale University Press. Her exhibition "Richard Avedon: Relationships" debuted in Milan at the Palazzo Reale during fashion week in 2022, was shown at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Palermo, Sicily in Spring of 2023, and will open at the Kunsthal Rotterdam in the Netherlands in June 2024.
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