Black Rock, Special Edition (2006), $325.00
By Peter Goin and Paul F. Starrs
This limited edition of Black Rock, is covered in a special jacket. An original color photograph, Moonrise over Black Rock, printed by Peter Goin, is mounted to the front cover. A letterpress printed map decorates the back of the jacket, with a color line individually striped by Paul F. Starrs. This special edition jacket was constructed and printed on letterpress by master printer, John Balkwill, Lumino Press, Santa Barbara, California. The edition size is 125 copies.
Black Rock is a collaborative book by the celebrated geographer Paul F. Starrs and photographer Peter Goin. It is also a major exhibit: more than twenty years of exploring, photographing, experiencing.
The eight literary essays of this project are elemental. Four are rooted in air, fire, earth, and water. But four more are also the children of a quartet of decidedly different perspectives. One looks from directly overhead, in an orthogonal view. Another is oblique — from thirty degrees of incline, sighting down, at an angle. Third is a profile view — at ground level and looking horizontally. But the last look is taken from below the surface of the playa, that great plane of clay and saliniferous deposits, abraded and graded by scouring sand, that makes it such a popular site for rocketeers, four-wheelers, or the children of the Burning Man. As for the elements, in the desert they are everything, especially in this one. Air is the shaper of ventifacts and playa lakes, forming dunes and drifts, chiseling and abrading. Fire — subterranean, in mantle-based heat that moves mountains, cracks faults, and shapes springs, is all about. Water and earth interact everywhere; true, when water prevails desert disappears; but as much, when earth, or soil, dries, the land is bared.