The Brooks Range

About the Book

The Brooks Range: Journey, Life, and Art in the Gwazhal is a linen-bound centerpiece book showcasing the imagery of landscape photographer and mountaineer Claude Fiddler. Featuring photographs taken over a span of 21 years, the starkly beautiful images accompany essays from esteemed Alaska writers. The pages paint a vivid Arctic portrait of vastness, hardship, love, and history. The first — and only — edition is just 600 copies.

No serious mountain book collector will want to miss this one. Find out more and see a detailed preview of the book on Claude Fiddler’s website.

Essays

• Re-creating What it Means to be Human by Roman Dial

• Memories of the Land by Adeline Raboff

• Gwazhal Girl by Adeline Raboff

• Caribou Cartography by Caroline Van Hemert

• And Again by Claude Fiddler

• And Now by Nancy Lord

Critical Review

by David Zurick (excerpted)

I’ve never visited the Brooks Range, and now, having seen Claude Fiddler’s exquisite portfolio of photographs, I feel I may not need to. His images are so gorgeous, immersive, and transcendent that all I may need to do in the future, were I to have a hankering to go and see and experience for myself the region, is enter the pages of his book. The images in it are that good.

The book’s opening image, “Storm clouds and peaks at Sheenjek and Hulahula River divide” does its job admirably well. It sets a stage of rugged terrain, atmospheric turmoil, and fast-changing light. It speaks of exploration, and an artist’s pursuit of adventure and beauty in a remote land. It evokes awe and the mystery of a spiritual landscape – which the Brooks Range, known as the Gwazhal, is held to be among the indigenous people of the region.

The other photographs (80 in all, made over a 20-year period) are as good as the opening one. Each contains the jaw-dropping beauty of an Ansel Adams alpine photograph and color palette of one by Richard Misrach. What sets Claude Fiddler’s work apart is that he combines both in a single image. The terrain is rendered at majestic scales and in breathtaking hues. The pictures are at once both muscular and intimate, made under challenging circumstances that I can only imagine.

The book contains scenes of human despoilation as well as untouched wildness, and explanatory words by the author as well as short essays about nature, spirit, memory, and an adventurous life by writers well-versed in the Alaskan Arctic and Brooks Range. All are fitting companions to the imagery.