Publication Date: 15 December 2003	$29.95 · £21.00
UK Publication Date: 12 January 2004	73 duotone plates · 120 pages · 1-930066-13-9

In his search for sites to paint, Chuck Forsman, an acclaimed landscape painter, traveled through the American West with a 35mm camera. These images by this "Western Rider" were taken not from a horse saddle, but rather from the shotgun seat of his car. Forsman took his photographs spontaneously, in all seasons, weather conditions, and times of day, creating a body of energetic and poetically direct work that reviewers have already favorably compared to Robert Frank's classic The Americans.

Just as Frank offered a new and penetratingly honest perspective on America, Forsman here presents an equally unique and powerful portrayal of the American West that captures its stark and gripping beauty. Melding familiar and enduring scenes of Western landscape with the classic American trope of the open highway, these images offer new and incisive insights into the relationship between Americans and the land. Forsman's frame of the open road expands upon the common experience of gazing at a landscape—but through the modern lens of an automobile window.

Chuck Forsman is professor of fine arts and painting at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the author of Arrested Rivers. He has had more than forty solo exhibitions since 1971, and his work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Denver Art Museum, and the Phoenix Art Museum, among others.