Within the Stone: Nature's Abstract Rock Art
by Bill Atkinson, Si Frazier, Ann Frazier, Robert Hutchinson

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Book Reviews of Within the Stone: Nature's Abstract Rock Art

Book Review: A Groundbreaking and breathtaking book
Summary: 5 Stars

Bill Atkinson, the photographer-creator of Withn The Stone is responisble for more than just its stunning photography. In his previous life, Bill was instrumental in creating the original Macintosh computer, and the graphical user interface that the whole world now takes for granted. In recent years, Bill has focused his computer-science expertise on his other pasion, photography, sharing his discoveries with leading professional photographers across the country, and becoming, in a real sense, the "Ansel Adams" of digital photo printing. Having pushed the limits of photographic printing, Atkinson has now done the same thing for bookmaking. Four-color presses have never before been capable of reproducing colors as intense as those in these images. So Atkinson had to develop a whole new method of color printing for the Japanese firm that printed this exquisite book.

Thus, Within The Stone is not only a remarkable artistic achievement, it's a technical breakthrough as well, the new benchmark in color photo book making. But most importantly, it is a major aesthetic creation. These are fresh images, images that transcend their literal content, windows into a unexpected world. This is a book you will return to again and again, discovering something new each time you look Within The Stone.

Summary of Within the Stone: Nature's Abstract Rock Art

After helping to usher in the age of personal computing by designing the graphical user interface of the Macintosh computer, Atkinson turned his visual and technical talents to nature photography. While shooting in the Painted Desert, Atkinson became intrigued with the brilliant colors in the petrified wood littering the ground. He brought home some polished rock slabs, photographed them in natural color and without magnification, and was enthralled. The photographs looked more like paintings of forgotten dreams than either rocks or photographs. Atkinson went on to borrow and photograph thousands of art-quality stones at gem shows.

From these thousands of stones, Atkinson has picked for WITHIN THE STONE those seventy-two that yielded the most striking, the most poetic, and the most ineffable images. Many of the photographs suggest the styles of particular masters of modern painting: Klee, Klimt, Turner, O?Keefe.

To accompany these images, the publisher commissioned seventy literary pieces for WITHIN THE STONE from seven top writers, each one accomplished in both scientific and artistic fields. Each writer was asked to free-associate with his or her ten assigned photographs as though they were Rorschach patterns on steroids. The seven contributors are DIANE ACKERMAN (poet and psychologist), PHILIP BALL (Nature editor and dramatist), JOHN HORGAN (science writer and philosopher), ANDREW REVKIN (New York Times reporter and screenplay writer), DORION SAGAN (science writer and novelist), TYLER VOLK (biologist and architect), and DAVID ZINDELL (science fiction novelist and mathematician).

In an appendix to WITHIN THE STONE, professional lapidaries SI and ANN FRAZIER and mineral scientist ROBERT HUTCHINSON provide a detailed description and commentary for each specimen.

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• Books > Subjects > Arts & Photography > Photography
• Reference
• Literature & Fiction > Essays
• Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Rocks & Minerals