Peter Goin and the Photography of Environmental Change: Visual Literacy and Altered Landscapes (Routledge Environmental Humanities)

Peter Goin and the Photography of Environmental Change narrates the forty-year quest of award-winning and internationally exhibited contemporary photographer Peter Goin to document human-altered landscapes across America and beyond. It is a collaborative work between an artist and a literary critic, a retrospective of an accomplished environmental photographer, and an innovative education in visual reading.

Enduring howling wind, pounding rain, and blistering sun, Goin bears witness to radioactive landscapes, abandoned mines, simulated swamps, rechanneled rivers, controlled burns, overgrown ruins, industrialized agriculture, shrinking reservoirs, feral spaces in the city, architected wilderness, sacred wastelands, contested borderlands, and more. Based on more than seventy hours of taped interviews with the artist spanning over a decade, trailblazing ecocritic Cheryll Glotfelty narrates the arc of Goin's career, sharing excerpts from their conversations that reveal his brilliant mind and piquant personality while situating his work within the broader context of environmental thinkers.

This beautifully illustrated volume, with 200 images in color and black-and-white showcasing Goin’s work, will be a fascinating and insightful read for upper-level students, academics, and researchers in photography, environmental history and culture, landscape studies, and environmental humanities.

Cheryll Glotfelty, the nation's first professor of Literature and Environment, enjoyed a twenty-eight-year career at the University of Nevada, Reno, before retiring in 2018. Her coedited The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology is a progenitive work in the environmental humanities. Her two coedited volumes, The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place and The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg, explore bioregional approaches to harmonizing culture with nature. Glotfelty's literary criticism and reviews have appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Women's Studies, ATQ, Southwestern American Literature, Western American Literature, Literature and Belief, and edited collections. Her art criticism has appeared in Material Ecocriticism and Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century. She is a cofounder, past president, and honorary lifetime member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment.