Gone to sanctuary

John Kiewit's photographs create lingering traces on the imagination of what remains of the Old West. These starkly elegant images capture the decaying details of a time from our recent past when life was much simpler and closer to bedrock reality than it seems today. Yet these are not sentimental reflections on nostalgic "good old days," rather, Kiewit's artistry is to present his natural and manmade subjects with an eye for the beauty and epic grandeur that can still be discovered in abandoned or wilderness lands, if one just takes the time and trouble to go out and look at it. The photographs, matched with quotations from his own journal entries, as well as from authors associated with the west (Steinbeck, Abbey Kerouac, Muir, et al.), along with words from such inspirational sources as the Buddha, the Bible, Thoreau, Whitman and Emerson, make for a volume that offers not only thought-provoking but aesthetic pleasure.