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PATAGONIA : Images of a Wild Land
By David Neilson

This book by Australian photographer David Neilson, contains a superb collection of photographs featuring the spectacular Andean regions of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego in southern South America. Cerro Torre, Fitz Roy, and the Torres del Paine are among the peaks featured in the photographs in both colour and black & white duotone. The text contains brief essays on the exploration, climbing history and natural history and a longer account of an expedition that sailed a yacht from Scotland to the Strait of Magellan, climbed in western Tierra del Fuego and then made a crossing of the Southern Patagonian Ice-cap.

Hardcover, 254mm x 328mm, 96 pages, 44 colour photos, 20 black & white duotones, 30 small black & whites, 25,000 word text, 3 maps and bibliography. Published 1999. ISBN 0958575304

$75 including postage within Australia

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REVIEWS

"The scope of this book is one of its virtues. While most visitors to Patagonia limit themselves to the eastern sides of the Fitz Roy and Paine areas, Neilson has ventured into the heart of the matter, most notably on a voyage in 1977 and 1978 that began in Scotland on a sailboat ... Neilson was in Patagonia with a photographer's eye, and we are treated to photos that are crafted, taken with a photographer's patience and tenacity to find that perfect perspective and moment. Familiar vistas are revisited as well as far more esoteric images of remote fiords, valleys, mountain- and ice-scapes ... Patagonia is things extreme, near earth's end, where outworldly landscapes are manifest and primal forces remain unbridled. Some of this Patagonian essence can be experienced vicariously: Neilson's 25,000 words and 61 plates do a superb job of conveying it."

Michael Bearzi, American Alpine Journal

 

 

"Australian photographer David Neilson has a particular love for the dramatic Patagonian landscape. In a new book, "Patagonia : Images of a Wild Land", he documents his three visits to the region during the 1970s, one of which included an eight-month journey to cross the Southern Patagonian ice-cap. This is tough territory, indeed, and Neilson's account is full of icy winds and flurrying snow. Not your idea necessarily, of a restful holiday. But his pictures, in colour and black and white, display the majestic stillness that reduces human pettiness to trivia. He calls the final trip the "highlight of his life", and it's clear why. His photographs of the mountains, glaciers, volcanoes and waterfalls, with vistas like those over Hyatt Sound, are impossibly beautiful, as though the Valhalla of the gods really existed

Rosemary Sorensen, The Brisbane Courier-Mail

 

 

"In this beautiful book David Neilson strikes the correct balance of text, of historical information and above all of a mixture of black and white and of colour photos ... The reader is treated to a truly magnificent photographic display of the region in all its terrible beauty. To the mountaineer the black and white photos must invoke the great difficulties involved and one can almost feel the cold and ice from studying them. For the non-mountaineer the book has to be a valued library addition and, dare I say, a slightly different coffee table read ... A must for the mountaineer or the friend of Patagonia."

Michael Duffy, Irish Mountain Log

 

 

"It is a magnificent book and there is the best photo of the south face of Fitz Roy I have ever seen ."

Geoff Birtles, High Magazine UK

 

"A handsome high-quality publication that's as much a celebration of the region's early explorers and mountaineers as a photographic gallery ."

Susan Kurosawa, The Weekend Australian

 

"A double page spread in colour of Fitz Roy at sunrise literally takes the breath away ... but Neilson's black and white photographs are also very dramatic ... and it's a great read in the genre of some of the best adventures of intrepid explorers."

Paul Burrows, ProPhoto Magazine

 

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