The Last Wilderness: Images of the Canadian Wild

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

To say that this book includes the best of today’s Canadian landscape
photography is no exaggeration. With 140 color plates selected from
thousands of submissions by 46 of our most accomplished nature
photographers, it is outstanding in volume, quality, vision, and scope.
The unifying links among the photos are attention to texture and the
ability to see beauty in every corner of nature. The photos create an
artistic statement about nature, going well beyond documenting pretty
views. Each shows the photographer’s awe—or even reverence—of
nature. Most of the photos have a spiritual quality.

At times it is hard to remember that these are photos: some have the
texture of an oil painting, others suggest the softness of a pastel
drawing or the interpretive, muted tones of a tapestry or watercolor.
Some are interpretive realism, some abstracts, others almost
surrealistic.

The super-large page size is used to maximum effectiveness, giving
every photo the size and shape (cropping) needed to allow the textures
to appear their best. Hence some photos are fairly small, offset by a
wide border of white space, while others are given the force conferred
by a double-page spread in the extra-large format.

In reproduction quality, considerable care has been taken to achieve an
extremely high saturation, so each plate has the quality of a
hand-printed original.

The preface by David Suzuki and the text are both very slight, and
little more than well-phrased platitudes on which to hang the photos.
Given that the book is such a success as a photogallery, this can be
easily excused. A more serious flaw is that the photographers’ names
do not appear in the captions, but rather are listed separately in
hard-to-find lists throughout the book.

As a coffee-table book, The Last Wilderness has a further strength: it
doesn’t wear thin even after repeated viewing. Every time through, the
viewer finds something new to admire.