Within the Stone - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0763181897 ISBN 13: 9780763181895

Publisher: Browntrout Pub, 2004

Synopsis

With this book of color photographs of the polished hearts of stones portrayed as natural paintings, BILL ATKINSON completes his transition from whiz kid of Silicon Valley to high priest of Silica.

After helping to usher in the age of personal computing by designing the graphical user interface of the Macintosh computer, Atkinson turned his visual and technical talents to nature photography. While shooting in the Painted Desert, Atkinson became intrigued with the brilliant colors in the petrified wood littering the ground. He brought home some polished rock slabs, photographed them in natural color and without magnification, and was enthralled. The photographs looked more like paintings of forgotten dreams than either rocks or photographs. Atkinson went on to borrow and photograph thousands of art-quality stones at gem shows.

From these thousands of stones, Atkinson has picked for WITHIN THE STONE those seventy-two that yielded the most striking, the most poetic, and the most ineffable images. Many of the photographs suggest the styles of particular masters of modern painting: Klee, Klimt, Turner, O’Keefe.

To accompany these images, the publisher commissioned seventy literary pieces for WITHIN THE STONE from seven top writers, each one accomplished in both scientific and artistic fields. Each writer was asked to free-associate with his or her ten assigned photographs as though they were Rorschach patterns on steroids. The seven contributors are DIANE ACKERMAN (poet and psychologist), PHILIP BALL (Nature editor and dramatist), JOHN HORGAN (science writer and philosopher), ANDREW REVKIN (New York Times reporter and screenplay writer), DORION SAGAN (science writer and novelist), TYLER VOLK (biologist and architect), and DAVID ZINDELL (science fiction novelist and mathematician).

In an appendix to WITHIN THE STONE, professional lapidaries SI and ANN FRAZIER and mineral scientist ROBERT HUTCHINSON provide a detailed description and commentary for each specimen.

About this title

From the Publisher:

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE picks WITHIN THE STONE photograph for "VISIONS OF EARTH" spread in July 2005 issue

AMERICAN PHOTO picks WITHIN THE STONE "BEST PHOTO BOOK OF 2004" in the category of "Art and Science"

Winner of 2004 GOLD INK AWARD for printing excellence in the category of hardcover books.

About the Author:

BILL ATKINSON has achieved distinction as an innovator in the divergent fields of nature photography, printmaking, computer science, and neuroscience. He came to photography from computer science, to which he in turn came from neuroscience. In 1978, he was recruited by Apple Computer out of the University of Washington, where he was developing a computer atlas of the human brain. He joined the six-person core Macintosh development team, which included Jef Raskin and Andy Hertzfeld—who join Bill Atkinson onstage for the 20th Birthday of the Mac keynote panel at MacWorld Expo in Boston. Atkinson was responsible for designing and implementing the Mac’s revolutionary mouse-based graphical user interface. He holds the copyright to the pull-down menu. Atkinson has gone on to make seminal contributions to the development of fine-art digital photography and printmaking. With colleague Charles Cramer, Atkinson has taught his new method to over 200 nature photographers, including Franz Lanting, Jack Dykinga, and the late Galen Rowell. WITHIN THE STONE is the first book to showcase the unprecedented intensity of saturation and definition attainable by the Atkinson method.

SI and ANN FRAZIER write regularly for The Lapidary Journal. They have been in the mineral and gem business since 1965. Si Frazier taught mineralogy at San Francisco State University. ROBERT HUTCHINSON is the author of a dozen books on geology and natural history. He has done research in mineral science at the American Museum of Natural History and in micropaleontology at Columbia University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Browntrout Pub
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0763181897
• ISBN 13: 9780763181895
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 179