This book by Alton Byers is a first-rate example of repeat photography, and the photographs demonstrate excellent reproduction. Even the nearly 70-year-old enlargements acquired from contact prints of 35-mm negatives appear remarkably clear (it was necessary to use the prints of the negatives because the negatives themselves were lost). His own replicas are outstanding, especially considering that taking them required many thousands of meters of climbing, even serious mountaineering, in search of the exact locations from which the historic photographs had been taken, as far back as the 1950s. The book presents a total of 133 photographs, many of them panoramas, covering the fields of anthropology, human geography, landscape change, and glaciology. This leads into assessment of the impacts of the massive increase in trekking tourism and mountaineering, together with the effects of current climate warming. It follows that the photographic collection is of vital importance as a historical document. Byers introduces us, through their photography, to many of the early pioneers of mountaineering and survey in the Khumbu. They include John Hunt, Charles Evans, Fritz Muller, Erwin Schneider, Helmut Heuberger, and Charles Houston. The list continues on to anthropologists and foresters, some of whom are known to have published highly contentious claims of post-1950 severe deforestation. These “activists” used dire, yet improbable, claims of landscape despoliation in order to urge government action to establish the Sagarmatha (Mt Everest) National Park and World Heritage Site designation. In this context alone, Byers's record is vital historically, the more so when he considers the recent impacts of climate warming. The misleading claims of massive deforestation are climaxed by a now well-known assertion that a hillslope that was densely forested in 1957 was bare of trees some 2 decades later. In fact, Byers has shown photographically that the same hillslope was devoid of tre
Kathmandu The Forbidden Valley Blue Colour
WENDY MOORE
ST. MARTIN PRESS/PAN MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS LIMITED
NEPAL GERMAN KONIGREICH AM HIMALAYA
TONI HAGEN
OXFORD & IBH PUBLISHING COMPANY, INDIA
MY KIND OF KATHMANDU
Desmond Doig
HARPER COLLINS PUBLISHERS LIMITED
Nepal Valley of Gods
GILLES BEGUIN
INDIA BOOK DISTRIBUTORS
NEPAL Old Images New Insights
PRATAPADITYA PAL
MARG PUBLICATIONS
Himalayan Drawings
ROBERT POWELL
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS
BUDDHIST HIMALAYA
MATTHIEU RICARD,OLIVIER FOLLMI
THAMES & HUDSON
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF KATHMANDU
JAWED ASHRAF
WISDOM TREE INDIA
NEPAL DOWN THE AGES Glimpses Of Nepali History Culture & Life Style In Paintings
HARI PRASAD SHARMA
ADARSH PUBLICATIONS, NEW DELHI, INDIA
Fill up your details to notify you when this book will be available