Neon Mesa by Rob Atkins
List Price: $39.95
Sale Price: $33.96
Savings of 15 %
DESCRIPTION
Neon Mesa: Wonders of the Southwest is a stunning photographic record of the vernacular landscape of the American Southwest – the roadside landscape littered with the signs and relics, sights and debris, of countless anonymous road trips. The Four Corners is a unique region where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah meet. Rob Atkins’ photos capture the irony and pathos of the place in icons of the American Dreams, be they those of the Nuclear Age, the Frontier, the Cowboy, or the Native American, all caught in the stark majestic images of a present already passing, in rusting road-signs, flickering neon light, and derelict motels, set against some America’s most awe-inspiring natural scenery.
REVIEWS
via Rio Grande Sun (c) 2010 – It’s like a trip back in time. It’s nostalgia and it’s history. It brings back memories of trips you might have taken if you are old enough to remember such trips and it’s like a time machine for those too young to have experienced them in person. There is almost a Twilight Zone kind of feel to some of the images, as if you have stumbled across some sort of time warp or taken a side road and ended up, well, somewhere where they haven’t heard of the ubiquitous golden arches or Walmart. It’s Neon Mesa, a book of photographs by Rob Atkins. Atkins likes the word ‘quirky’ and he applies it to the images printed in Neon Mesa.
via Amazon.com (c) 2010 – “Atkins’ dazzling color photos of the transience of the artificial within the seemingly indifferent perdurance of the landscapes and skies of the U.S. Southwest appear broad as the horizon and deep as the distance in this wider-than-high album. This is so even when a picture’s subject in its entirety is close to the camera, as in several shots of decorations on the walls of defunct roadside businesses. In the minimal texts Atkins inserts every so many pages, he often sounds like the great black-and-white photographer of small-town and rural America, David Plowden, when he remarks that what we see in a given picture was gone when he returned to its site a year later. These are elegiac images of a social moment still within the living memory of millions. These are modern memento mori of stark, liminally humorous beauty.”
via Amazon.com (c) 2010 – “Not many books can sweep me away to a place so readily to feel its magic. Atkins has absolutely captured the essence of this very special region in its myths, colors, shapes, stories, symbols, and characters. I’ve been to many of these same places across the Southwest–down long dirt roads and through strange little towns that make you wonder if you’ve been suddenly whisked from the 21st century. Atkins masterfully captures the landscape with humor, skill, style, and an incredible eye for detail. In his image of a memorialized missile he points out the descending room numbers on the hotel’s doors as if they were counting down to lift off. I’m sure I’d not have noticed this tidbit, but I’m so glad he did.”
PRODUCT DETAILS
Hardcover: 144 pages
ISBN-10: 1593730683
ISBN-13: 978-1593730680
Language: English
Dimensions: 12.3 x 9.1 x 0.9 inches
Weight: 2.2 pounds
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rob Atkins
Rob Atkins has been a photographer for over thirty years, beginning his career in New York City. He now lives in Vancouver, Canada, where he divides his time between personal projects and commercial work. He has been widely published and exhibited, including a display of images that was on public view in Rockefeller Center in New York for one year.
No shows booked at the moment.
