The Art of Adventure [antikvár]

Agréât traveler, Galen Rowell is also a generous one. He returns from the world's far edges with splendid gifts—frames of film saturated with light and color, faraway places and high adventure. Like the 18th century sketch-artists who accompanied Captain Cook to the South Sea islands, he shows us remote places and peoples with a faculty that transcends mere illustration. When Galen asked me to write an introduction to this book, I suggested that one of his many famous admirers might do a better job. Unlike Galen, I have no perceptible talent with a camera nor any suggestion of physical courage. Our peculiar mission at Collins Publishers had been to bring together a group of photographers to capture whole countries on film in a single day. During the course of that odyssey, we were privileged to work with some of the world's greatest shooters. Again and again, we were amazed by their sheer talent. Like Galen, they are masters of light, color and composition and what Cartier-Bresson called, "the decisive moment." They make the ordinary extraordinary. After editing a dozen books and perhaps a million pictures taken by the pre-eminent lens-men of our time, we still wondered: What makes a good photographer great; what genetic quirk or germ of experience forms the piercing eye? I remember walking across Red Square late one night with Eddie Adams, Pulitzer Prize winner and widely regarded as "the photojournalist's photojournalist." Between furtive glances at our KGB tail, I asked him why some people can see a great picture before it is committed to film and others could not. Eddie, never known as a loquacious man, said he didn't know. Then he casually pointed at the half-moon rising beside a BCremlin tower. The tower was topped with an illuminated red star. It was perfect, just the right moment, and of course, I hadn't see it at all. So is all of this great photography business unexplainable because we have no lexicon? Is it like one explanation of early childhood—plainly remembered, but unexpressible now because we had no vocabulary then? There is a case for that. We work with photographs all day long nearly every day, and a lot of what we do involves separating good pictures from bad ones. When we come across a bad picture, we can normally tell you why it is bad, and when we find a good one, we can frequently offer a comment on that, too. But on those very rare