Unspoiled West: The Western Landscape as Seen by Its Greatest Photographers

This is pure and simple a coffee table book. I don't mean that in any derogatory sense at all. It's fairly large,10X12 inches,and only 128 pages.The first 20 pages of text gives a good history of how photography was invented and took off like a rocket during the Civil War and particularly the decade after.Here we learn who these earliest photographers were,the equipment and methods available to them;and how they proceeded to photograph this newly found West so that it could be shared with the rest of the world. The amazing thing about it all is that the quality of the photographs and skill of the photographers was so good and developed so quickly.To an untrained eye,like myself,it is impossible to tell if the photograph was taken during the frontier time;or just recently. The other hundred or so pages are mostly full-page landscape photographs,accompanied with short notes of description and names of the photographer.Most of the photographs were taken in the 1870's;so the whole book is B & W. But don't let that dissuade you. Ansel Adams and others have shown what can be done without color. No wonder many prefer B & W to color ,even today,particularly with landscapes and portraits.