NONFICTION - Sept. 26, 1993

THE LEGACY OF WILDNESS: The Photographs of Robert Glenn Ketchum, preface by Robert Redford, essay by John Perlin. (Aperture: $50; 120 pp.) Here is the first major retrospective of activist/photographer Robert Ketchum, representing 25 years of his astonishing landscape photography. Ketchum was born in Los Angeles, grew up in the Santa Monica Mountains and got an MFA in photography from the California Institute of the Arts. His first commission was photographing the Flathead Valley in Montana and Glacier National Park. In the early 1980s, he documented the recovery of the Hudson River; in the late 1980s he worked to protect 1 million acres of old-growth forest in Alaska (documented in “The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rainforest”). Since 1980 he has served as the curator of photography for the National Park Foundation. This collection includes 28 of Ketchum’s early, graphic black-and-white photos (see above), but most of the book is taken up with 71 four-color images. It’s almost as good as owning one of the prints.