Popular Photography Review

Though Kent Gunnufson didn’t have time to market his book because of working the construction trades and didn’t have connections or resources as a self-published book, regional and national publication reviews along with television exposure have been ecstatic. “A celebration in words and pictures of a grand American Landscape,” writes Dave Sargarin for the world’s leading photographic magazine, Popular Photography. He states candidly in his feature review, “The reason for this book’s being in these pages is the quality and interest of the photographs.”

 

Popular Photography Review on Tracking the Snowshoe Itinerant

Popular Photography Magazine review of Tracking the SnowShoe Itinerant is retyped below.

Popular Photography, January 1982 Pg 48 under Books by Dave Sagarin

“The preacher and photographer: a celebration, in words and pictures, of a grand American landscape, past and present”

“In 1861, his sight failing and some of his family having pretended him West, John Lewis Dyer, a Methodist preacher, set out from the Midwest to see Pike’s Peak. His travels across the plains, his sense of wonder at first seeing the mountains, and his marvelous adventures exploring, preaching, and working in the gold camps are set out in his book, Snow-Shoe Itinerant.

“Now Kent Gunnufson, a 35-year-old resident of Breckenridge, Co., and a landscape photographer in the grand romantic tradition, has combined several dozen of his photographs with excerpts from the Dyer autobiography, and published it himself with the title, Tracking the Snow-Shoe Itinerant.

The book is a pleasant size and shape —about 8 1/2 X 11 inches horizontal — and the pictures are printed centered on the right-hand pages. There is no guttering (running pictures across the middle of the book, so that some image is lost) or fancy variations in layout. The images range from square to standard horizontal format, with a few very slight verticals. The were taken on medium-format and 4X5 equipment. Gunnufson does all his own processing and printing, and has been very well served by the Larimar Press in Denver, who did the reproductions. Although the reason

 

for this book’s being reviewed in these pages is the quality and interest of the photographs, I must mention my fascination with the text: a first-person account, by a modest and decent man, of a time and place that have been obscured from us by legend, and by the movies.
Gunnufson’s style is very straightforward. He obviously loves these mountains, and wants very much to have us share his experience. There are broad landscapes, inspiring mountain ranges, media-range views of valleys, meadows, brooks, and waterfalls, ghost towns and gold camps an details, such as an abandoned sluice, a bit of machinery, a bleached skeleton.”

“One panorama (perhaps a double exposure?) shows a bridge over a river gleaming in the very last of twilight, with a magnificent starry sky above. There are several views, at differing scale, of moving water. There are buffalo and, occasionally, people: the people, strangely, don’t intrude (imagine a backpacker in an Ansel Adams or an Eliot Porter scene!)”

“A loose effort is made to relate the images to the text, with running captions in small type at the foot of each page. But the great theme that binds the pictures and the words is the love for the land, for the joy of experiencing rough weather and rough country.”

Tracking the Snow-Shoe Itinerant is available from Snowstorm Publications, Box 2310, Breckenridge, Colo. 80424.”