The Great Wilderness by Alex Nail | My Photo Bookshelf

Photobook
Written By Trevor Sherwin

I’ve followed and admired Alex Nail’s mountain photography for a few years through his website, YouTube, and podcasts and although I missed out on Alex’s first book “Northwest” (still hope to own a copy one day), when The Great Wilderness was announced, I made sure to buy myself a copy.

Author’s synopsis

“The Great Wilderness” is a luxury hardback photography book of Scotland’s most remote mountain area. It shows the Highlands during ephemeral moments of light, weather, and seasonal change. The images were captured over a 4-year period backpacking through the mountain areas of Fisherfield, Dundonnell and Letterewe. Alongside the images are stories of adventure in the mountains.

The book is designed, printed and bound entirely in the UK and uses the finest materials and production processes throughout. Depicting spectacular scenery in exceptional conditions, this book is for anyone who loves the outdoors.

My thoughts about the book

As I mentioned above, I missed out on owning a copy of Alex’s previous book, Northwest which has a chapter dedicated to The Great Wilderness, but as Alex mentions in his introduction, with so much to see and photograph there, a single chapter wasn’t enough. The Great Wilderness book project was born.

For those unaware (as I was), The Great Wilderness is a mountainous region formed of a small number of privately owned estates and in 2019, Alex set off on his multi-year adventure to photograph them.

The book starts with a wonderfully written foreword by one of the UK’s finest landscape photographers, Joe Cornish. Then on to Alex’s introduction, explaining more about the area, the reason for starting the project and a little about his photographic/editing ethos.

The pictures in the book are typically printed big with some panoramic images spanning both pages and this design decision helps portray (to a book’s best ability) the impact one might feel being there with Alex as he took the photo. I’m typically not a fan of pictures spanning the spine but I’ve since come to learn that in some situations, and with certain book designs it can work and this is one of them.

The image sequencing flows well and the book is organised by chapters, each featuring incredible photography from a different part of the region with names I won’t even attempt to pronounce and with the photos taken in different conditions with a range of compositional techniques used, by the time I had finished, I felt I had been shown a true representation of this fascinating landscape.

What a labour of love this book is. I really mean that. Not only is this book full of stunning mountain photography that would have taken huge amounts of time, planning and effort to create, but the book itself has been designed with so much attention to detail such as the choice of cloth for the cover, the beautifully written “on-location” stories and the incredible maps and illustrations created by Alex himself.

A fantastic landscape photography photo book and if it’s still available when reading this, I encourage you to pop over to Alex Nail’s website to buy yourself a copy.

Book Details

Trevor Sherwin
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