Buffalo Traces
A photo-essay narrative, Buffalo Traces is a compendium of interrelated stories and photographs exploring the geography, ethnology, art, history, and people of the Northern Great Plains. Conjured up from roadside encounters, kitchen table conversations, campsite chats and barroom banter, Mark Vitaris’s narratives mark personal waypoints on his journeys. In Buffalo Traces, Vitaris focuses on the movement of the explorers, artists and writers who followed in the wake of the bison for inspiration.
This book is available for pre-order now.
$80.00 CAD
Additional information
| Weight | 1.96 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 12 × 12 × .875 in |
| Page Count | 192 |
| Binding | Hard Cover |
| Year Published | 2024 |
Mark Vitaris
The eye is an inveterate collector.
– Walker Evans
The art of photographer, media producer, and mixed media artist Mark Vitaris is sweeping in style and scope. Through his art, he preserves that which is ephemeral. He believes there is an intimate connection between the forms his art takes and the circumstances from which it derives.
For much of his professional and artistic career, location photography has been his chosen métier. His work is project-based, honed from decades of professional assignments employing natural light and conditions to interpret visual concepts. His art is also projected-based and interdisciplinary. Five years of research and travel went into the production his current project, Borderlands, the book of the same title being a key aspect of this endeavour.
Vitaris earned a B.A. in Communications, from the University of Ottawa (Canada). His award winning work has been widely exhibited and is included in private and public collections provincially, nationally, and internationally. He resides in Calgary, Alberta.
Praise for Borderlands
Those of us whose concept of time and place is navigated with the click of a search engine have much to be grateful to Mark Vitaris and his beautiful new book Borderlands, published by Frontenac House.
Over 150 stunning black and white photographs, nuanced by short essays and commentary, take us on a journey through borderlands between the United States and Canada. But this is not a book about borderlands; it is about a wild landscape that has never recognized boundaries.
For his navigator, Vitaris draws on the 19th century American philosopher and psychologist William James who studied our shifting perception of time and developed the term “stream of consciousness.” Vitaris takes this as his roadmap, noting “The knowledge of some other part of the stream, past or future, near or remote, is always mixed in our knowledge of the present thing.”
It would be easy to create a book of familiar sentimental scenes of abandoned towns, barns, buildings and people. Vitaris sees beyond the clichéd images of abandoned buildings to the meaning that lingers on. He draws on the voices he hears, and uses natural light brilliantly to draw our eye into the clues residing in the scenes. He uses the “God-rays of light” to illuminate a creek bed, a distant barn, a clump of trees in ways that makes the eye follow the road and long to be there. In “Pendant d’Oreille” natural light floods into an abandoned room through an open door while in the distance the prairie hills seem to be gradually encroaching. His compositions are clear-eyed, flawless and evocative. This is a landscape that doesn’t tolerate sentimentality.
~ Donna Livingstone,
CEO, Peter and Catharine Whyte Foundation and
Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies
