George Masa's Wild Vision - A Japanese Immigrant Imagines Western North Carolina

Winner of the Thomas Wolfe Award
2023 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award Finalist
George Masa's Wild Vision recounts the incredible, overlooked life of the photographer George Masa.
Self-taught photographer George Masa (born Masahara Iizuka in Osaka, Japan), arrived in Asheville, North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century amid a period of great transition in the southern Appalachians.
Masa's photographs from the 1920s and early 1930s are stunning windows into an era where railroads hauled out the remaining old-growth timber with impunity, new roads were blasted into hillsides, and an activist community emerged to fight for a new national park. Masa began photographing the nearby mountains and helping to map the Appalachian Trail, capturing this transition like no other photographer of his time. His images, along with his knowledge of the landscape, became a critical piece of the argument for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, compelling John D. Rockefeller to donate $5 million for initial land purchases. Despite being hailed as the “Ansel Adams of the Smokies,” Masa died, destitute and unknown, in 1933.
In George Masa’s Wild Vision: A Japanese Immigrant Imagines Western North Carolina, poet and environmental organizer Brent Martin explores the locations Masa visited, using first-person narratives to contrast, lament, and exalt the condition of the landscape the photographer so loved and worked to interpret and protect. The book includes seventy-five of Masa’s photographs, accompanied by Martin’s reflections on Masa’s life and work.

About the author

Brent Martin is the author of three chapbook collections of poetry and of The Changing Blue Ridge Mountains: Essays on Journeys Past and Present. His poetry and essays have been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, Pisgah Review, Tar River Poetry, Chattahoochee Review, Eno Journal, New Southerner, Kudzu Literary Journal, Smoky Mountain News and elsewhere. He lives in the Cowee community in Western North Carolina, where he and his wife, Angela Faye Martin, run Alarka Institute. 

Summary

Winner of the Thomas Wolfe Award
2023 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award Finalist
George Masa's Wild Vision recounts the incredible, overlooked life of the photographer George Masa.
Self-taught photographer George Masa (born Masahara Iizuka in Osaka, Japan), arrived in Asheville, North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century amid a period of great transition in the southern Appalachians.
Masa's photographs from the 1920s and early 1930s are stunning windows into an era where railroads hauled out the remaining old-growth timber with impunity, new roads were blasted into hillsides, and an activist community emerged to fight for a new national park. Masa began photographing the nearby mountains and helping to map the Appalachian Trail, capturing this transition like no other photographer of his time. His images, along with his knowledge of the landscape, became a critical piece of the argument for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, compelling John D. Rockefeller to donate $5 million for initial land purchases. Despite being hailed as the “Ansel Adams of the Smokies,” Masa died, destitute and unknown, in 1933.
In George Masa’s Wild Vision: A Japanese Immigrant Imagines Western North Carolina, poet and environmental organizer Brent Martin explores the locations Masa visited, using first-person narratives to contrast, lament, and exalt the condition of the landscape the photographer so loved and worked to interpret and protect. The book includes seventy-five of Masa’s photographs, accompanied by Martin’s reflections on Masa’s life and work.

Foreword

Publicity

• Confirmed: Blue Ridge Public Radio, All Things Considered (Run date tbd)
• Confirmed: WUTC (Air date May 20)
• Confirmed: Coverage in Smoky Mountain News (Run date: June 15)
• Confirmed: Interview in Mountain Xpress (Run date TBD)
• Confirmed: Round-Up in WNC Magazine (June/July Issue)
• Confirmed: Review in Southern Review of Books (Late June)
• Confirmed: Round-up in The Laurel of Asheville (Run-date July)
• Placement of book within Father's Day supplements in national mags (Sierra Magazine, Garden & Gun etc)
• Awareness campaign with NC/GA/SC conservation and nature groups
• Tie-in to National Parks (Smoky Mountains National Park and the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area)
• Event schedule across SC and NC

• Seeking coverage in the national outlets that we always pitch (including the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, etc) 
  

Additional text

"George Masa fascinated people who knew him while he was alive, and his life and work have many of us even more curious (or obsessed) a hundred years later. Brent’s book transcends time with creative insights and reflections on the natural world that honor George Masa’s ‘Wild Vision’. His journey in Masa’s bootprints is at times personal and contemplative and other times communal and philosophical, asking big questions about our appreciation and stewardship of the natural world today. I’m certain Masa would enjoy a campfire chat with Brent." —Paul Bonesteel, Director and founder of Bonesteel Films

Product details

• Authors: Brent Martin
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 21.06.2022, delayed
• EAN: 9781938235931
• ISBN: 978-1-938235-93-1
• No. of pages: 160
• Series: Cold Mountain Fund Series
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Photography, film, video, TV; NATURE / General, Nature / Environmental Conservation & Protection, NATURE / Regional