Wide Angle [antikvár]

INTRa DUCTIDN Sam Abell's 1986 photograph of Leo Tolstoy's favorite path near the Russian literary genius's estate at Yasnaya Polyana suggests many things: hiking, sitting, observing, contemplating, and depicting. In this simple scene, two women stroll out of a black-hole vanishing point toward the camera, the forest is alive, and the presence of Tolstoy, taking a break, perhaps, from writing his masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, occupies the bench. Like this book, Abell's picture is a meditation on the many ways people experience and relate to places, pictures of places, and each other. These photos, many never before published, were selected from the National Geographic Society's archive of more than ten million images. All were taken somewhere along the path of life, where each of us finds our personal greatest places, which are not mere backdrops to our existence but active presences affecting who we are, what we believe, and how we live. In the great tradition of National Geographic magazine, this photo and those that follow are an invitation to explore with a sense of wonder places exotic and ordinary but also to consider in fresh ways the meaning of place. Through these photographs we can circle the world without leaving the place called home. —Ferdinand Protzman