Northwest Passage - Hardcover

Ketchum, Robert Glenn; Lopez, Barry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0893816760 ISBN 13: 9780893816766

Publisher: Aperture, 1996

Synopsis

Breathtaking arctic vistas from one of the most celebrated photographers of the natural world.

About this title

Review:

What can you do with a Pentax and vast amounts of ice and water? If your name is Robert Ketchum, there are no limits, not even the sky. The Northwest Passage, the Waterloo of many accomplished seamen, became the dream--and obsession--of former U.S. Treasury Secretary William Simon, who traversed the elusive and dangerous region in a yacht during the summer of 1994. Ketchum, hired to chronicle the 23-day expedition from Alaska, through Canada and the Northwest Territories to Greenland, produced stunning results; an on-board helicopter enabled him to photograph the terrain as no Arctic image maker before.

From Booklist:

For a long time, European explorers sought in vain for an Arctic shortcut to the riches of the Orient. Ships and men vanished. The Franklin Expedition of 1845 is the most famous failure. The Northwest Passage was not successfully traversed until the 1903^-6 expedition of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Ketchum, a great naturalist photographer, and nine others set off on a yacht in 1994, which eventually became (with the aid, on one occasion, of an ice-breaking ship) the fifty-sixth vessel to cross the Northwest Passage. The photography (aerial, island, and yacht shots) transports its viewers to a new and strange world that causes the adventuring heart to beat erratically. In the world's quest for minerals, oil, and gas reserves, in its misuse of the Arctic as a dumping ground, this powerful and majestic region is threatened, and at the close of the book, Ketchum the environmentalist makes those facts known. Yet charting this once mystic realm, in this fashion, is ironic--a siren's song to those watchful for the next frontier to develop. Bonnie Smothers

About this edition

• Publisher: Aperture
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0893816760
• ISBN 13: 9780893816766
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 95