Four Corners.

• Author: Kreyche, Gerald F.
• Position: Book Review

FOUR CORNERS BY DEBRA BLOOMFIELD UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS, 2004 151 PAGES, $45.00

The old saw has it that "A picture is worth a thousand words." This collection of photographs of our scenic American Southwest bears out that truism. This cocktail table book is not the usual variety. Four Corners has a marvelous historical introduction that sets the scene for the incredibly beautiful and haunting photographs that follow.

Artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe, and photographers such as Ansel Adams have flocked to this region, as the dry atmosphere, changing light conditions, and desert starkness all are grist for the creator's mill. Intellectuals once gathered at O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch. Director John Ford filmed many of his John Wayne westerns in northeast Arizona, captivating millions of motion picture viewers with his shots of Shiprock on the Navajo Reservation, and the various mesas and buttes of Monument Valley. In fact, for many tourists, he helped put the Southwest on the map.

To Easterners, Four Corners may seem a strange title for a book of photographs. The name is a description of four huge states converging at one geographic point. Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado all join borders. Tourists enjoy getting on their hands and knees at that point, boasting how they were in four states at once. (Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia also converge, but there is no other area in the U.S. that matches Four Corners.) These four-corner states contain a wealth of national parks and monuments and are ripe with Spanish, Mexican, Native American, and U.S. history. The Spanish provincial capital, Santa Fe, with its Governor's Palace, was established before the U.S. was a nation.

Much of the land is part of the geological formation known as the Colorado Plateau. Here, one can find Colorado's world famous Mesa Verde with its cliff dwellings that date back nearly 2,000 years. Around the 13th century, its inhabitants abandoned this venue and scholars still are not sure why. Chaco Canyon, with its 1,000-foot canyon walls, served as a redoubt for the Navajos...