It’s a joy to experience beautifully crafted photographs at face value, but often the stories behind the making of those images goes untold. These stories – documenting the relationship between photographer and subject – can enhance an image far beyond its initial interpretation.
William Albert Allard: Five Decades (National Geographic Society, 304 pp., $50) offers an opportunity to look deeper into the work of one of the most talented National Geographic photographers of the past 50 years. This retrospective, with a foreword by Allard’s friend William Kittredge, contains some of Allard’s most notable images, along with a set of essays by Allard that serve as a kind of photographic diary.
Glancing through Allard’s mysterious and telling images on the page is already a pleasure, but to read the adjoining text documenting his experiences with the photo, subject, and situation heightens the viewer’s experience.
Allard’s photo story on the Hutterites, one of the oldest Anabaptist groups in North America, is an excellent example. The images, which combine quiet moments with a strong sense of light, color, and composition, stand on their own. But through Allard’s intimate account of his time spent with a Hutterite colony in Montana, the viewer is pulled in even deeper. Allard’s written accounts have the same revealing yet mysterious quality as the images, allowing the reader to experience snatches of the time Allard spent with this isolated culture.
Allard also chronicles his lifelong interest in the people and landscapes of Montana, where he now lives. Some of the most stunning iconic images of America come from Allard’s vision of Montana. Frames of cow camps, buckaroos, rodeos, and ranches accompany true and tall tales from Allard’s fieldwork and bring both reality and romanticism to our view of the Western frontier. Allard takes the viewer to a distant time and place through his written accounts and classic imagery.
Ann Hermes is a Monitor staff photographer.
