The Great Divide

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

The Great Divide features more than 40 magnificent black-and-white
depictions of the Canadian Rockies by the Banff Centre’s photography
facilitator, Ernie Kroeger, and a lyrically insightful introduction by
Alberto Manguel.

Kroeger’s artistic eye captures such images as the design of gnarled
roots at a trailside, the texture of rocky rubble from a landslide, the
delicate interplay of light and dark between clouds and mountains, the
staccato ripples of rain on a lake, and the chill of white snow on bald,
ice-cold rock. Kroeger has been creating these photographic records of
the Rockies since the early 1990s, with various of them featured in
exhibitions at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, the Edmonton Art Gallery, the
Photographers Gallery in Saskatoon, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and
the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff.

Manguel’s introduction is as sensually stimulating as Kroeger’s
photographs are visually arresting. In describing the Rockies, for
example, he writes, “There is something mildly erotic about the traces
left by the ice stripping the stone, something like observing the inside
of a peach or pomegranate.” Not to be outdone as a narrator, Kroeger
provides an essay of his own in which he discusses the sources of his
photographic inspiration; he also provides tersely descriptive captions
for each of the photographs. Artists, professional photographers, and
anyone with an interest in the Canadian Rockies will find The Great
Divide a captivating and aesthetically pleasing volume.