Author: Jill Metcoff

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780299141400

The Lower Wisconsin River is one of the last long stretches of undammed waterway in the Midwest. This exquisite photo essay reveals the timelessness of the river and the land along its banks--primeval sloughs, towering bluffs with their sandstone terraces, wetlands awash in spring floods, and low prairies so rich and varied that they yield both cactus and cattails. Jill Metcoff has spent some twenty years photographing the ninety-three miles of the lower river from Prairie du Sac to the Mississippi with antique large- and medium-format cameras. These 104 photographs, lavishly printed and evocatively capturing the landscape in shades of black and white, are in the tradition of Eliot Porter and H. H. Bennett. They are accompanied throughout the book by "voices" of the region, including Aldo Leopold, August Derleth, John Muir, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as contemporary voices from public hearings on the future of the Lower Wisconsin riverway. This landscape--eons old and left untouched by the glaciers that ground much of Wisconsin's ancient landforms into gravel--has escaped major development despite its location within 200 miles of more than twenty million people. But all that could change tomorrow. Metcoff's work is a passionate appeal to view and value the riverway in all its variety and grandeur.