Park Place Format: Hardback

A sometimes humorous but always perceptive look at how we experience national parks and monuments out West.

The National Park Service was established by an act of Congress in 1916 to “preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.” This directive to protect wilderness yet provide accessibility to it without somehow compromising the integrity of the natural resources seems to be a self-fulfilling contradiction and an arena for conflicting priorities.

In Park Place, photographer David Heberlein explores the tension between access and enjoyment and preservation of America’s public lands. From 1992 to 2019, he traveled throughout the American West and visited thirty-five national parks, monuments, and recreation areas. His stunning photographs, made in the course of his many journeys, document the human presence within the national parks and monuments of the American West. They allude to human influence both through the marks we make on the land—whether temporary or permanent—and through the presence of visitors who appear in numerous shapes and sizes performing a variety of familiar sightseeing activities. These shifting scenarios provide compelling photographic documentation of the multiple roles that national parks and monuments play and the ongoing need to balance the human impact on nature with the preservation of wild places.

Park Place features sixty-four tritone photographs by David Heberlein along with an introductory essay by the photographer and an afterword. It promises to be a welcome addition to a longstanding tradition of artists, writers, and photographers heading out West to see and explore and interpret America’s national treasures.

David Heberlein is a professor emeritus from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, where he taught art and photography for thirty-three years. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Minnesota History Center; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Plains Art Museum in Moorhead, Minnesota; Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis; and Wisconsin Historical Society. His photographs have also appeared in numerous publications, among them EXTRAordinary―American Place in Recent Photography (Madison Art Center, 2001); Wisconsin Then and Now, the Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Rephotographic Project (University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Minnesota In Our Time: A Photographic Portrait (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2000); Metroscapes (University of Washington Press/Weisman Art Museum, 1998); and Another Look: Wisconsin Photographs Past and Present (Wisconsin State Historical Society Press, 1998). His Website is davidheberlein.com.