Western Rider: Views from a Car Window

For this book, Chuck Forsman—a landscape painter held in the highest regard—undertook a fascinating project: while traveling the American West in search of places to paint, he took 35mm black-and-white photographs of the landscape as seen not from the saddle of a horse but from behind the wheel of a car. He shot his images spontaneously, in all seasons, weather conditions, and times of day, creating a body of energetic and poetically direct work that reviewers have already compared favorably to Robert Frank's The Americans—one of the twentieth century's most significant works of photography. Just as Frank offered a penetratingly honest and new view of America during the 1950s, so too does Forsman present us with equally honest views of the American West, views that capture the gripping beauty of the American road as well as the common experience we share in looking at a landscape the way it is most often seen: through the window of an automobile.

Chuck Forsman is a professor of fine arts and painting at the University of Colorado, Boulder.