 UNDER THE SUN:
A Sonoran Desert Odyssey
Adriel Heisey
Rio Nuevo Publishers
Tucson, Arizona
ISBN: 0-9700750-0-6
2000
$40.00
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The Sonoran Desert, which
straddles the Arizona-Mexico border, is like no other place on earth. In Under the
Sun: A Sonoran Desert Odyssey, writer, photographer, and pilot Adriel Heisey helps us
see and appreciate it in a whole new light. Heisey's astonishing aerial images reveal a rugged
landscape that is at once sublime and surreal, forbidding yet fragile, intimate and
infinitely varied. His sensual prose puts us in the pilot's seat and invites us to
experience the desert from his unique perspective.
FROM UNDER THE SUN:
"My first seconds off the ground feel as if I've launched for outer space. The few
precious details of survival loom large just now, and I'm frowning with intense
concentration.
But behind the mask, I am serene. I have a
watcher inside me who is immune to all danger. I watch my rapid ascent change the world. I
watch the way the horizon is drawing back like a vast iris, gently opening. I watch nearby
mountaintops sink into the earth, while beyond them distant peaks rise up in a slow,
revelatory circle-dance as I climb higher and higher.
The land around me is showing itself with
disarming candor, and my thoughts fall silent in the presence of so much nakedness. I'm
losing touch with my singularity, my shrunken little life on the ground. The sky has
become a boundless cosmos, alive with depth, as if it can quicken me out of the grip of
simple location, into its realm of being everywhere at once."
"Adriel Heisey's prose is as breathtaking to the inner ear as his photographs are to
the eye. He takes the reader aloft on a journey of courage and vision and includes us in
his reverence and love for the earth below his wings. Reading this story, and meditating
on these images, will lead people to their own reverence for the mysterious beauty of the
earth." |
Christina Baldwin
Author, Calling the Circle: The First and Future Culture
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"There have been thoroughly engaging aviator narrators (Antoine de Saint Exupery in Wind,
Sand, and Stars or Beryl Markham in West with the Night), and there have been
pilot / photographers offering astounding images (William Garnett, John Shelton, Marily
Bridges), but Adriel Heisey is the first to do both -- with a disarming ease, quiet eye,
and gentle prose. Under The Sun
combines the best of naturalist endeavors: the ancient bestiary with its fabulous texts
and images, a contemporary love of the place in which he dwells, and the elegant crafting
of his machine, photographs, and prose." |
Peter Warshall
Editor, Whole Earth
Magazine of the Whole Earth Catalog
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"As a professional pilot, Adriel Heisey
was stimulated by the beauty of the land he saw from the air, and forumlated a plan. He
built a very light airplane and outfitted it for his photographic mission. Now in this
book, with his elegant writing and beautiful photographs, he gives us the reward!" |
William Garnett
Aerial Photographer
Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture
University of California, Berkeley
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Adriel Heisey is an important new
photographer of the American landscape. His work is original and unforced. Most
importantly, it derives from deeply held artistic ideals that have been tested in the
field and found true. His work is of our time; it is also timeless. |
Sam Abell
Photographer
National Geographic magazine
Author, Stay This Moment |
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