Upstream

Charles Lindsay's lens points inward as well as out. In Mentawai Shaman: Keeper of the Rain Forest, he captured his time living with an Indonesian tribal leader and hunter. Closer to home, Upstream explores his latest odyssey: five years spent roaming the American West with a fly rod in one hand and a camera in the other. Here we find photographer as predator, slipping unseen into an alien world to witness the hidden lives of his quarry, to understand his own stalking. The hunter-artist returns from his extended fishing trip with some of the most striking testimonials to an ancient pursuit ever seen. As with Ansel Adams's photos, Lindsay's landscapes of arid hills, big skies, and rushing rivers can be stark and ominous, but Lindsay infuses the lonely, wide-open spaces with a sense of possibility that only a living thing can provide: A sudden swirl in an opaque pool. A taught line whipsawing across a riffle. A dense hatch of mayflies rising above the surface. And then the chance, if brief, to greet the nearly unknowable denizen of another world--a fish miraculously to hand. There's humor and futility, too: the inevitable bird's nest of tippet and fly knotted around a willow. These are images that will enthrall fly-fishers and photography enthusiasts alike, matched with the peerless prose of outdoorsman-author Thomas McGuane.