{"title":"Michael Kolster","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"paris-park-photographs-book-michael-kolster-9781938086885","title":"Paris Park Photographs","description":"Michael Kolster renders Paris's parks like no one since photographer Eugene Atget a century ago.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49742469824785,"sku":"NGR9781938086885","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50394046529809,"sku":"CIN1938086880G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1938086880.jpg?v=1751427193"},{"product_id":"l-a-river-book-michael-kolster-9781938086649","title":"L.A. River","description":"Three centuries ago, the Los Angeles River meandered through marshes and forests of willow and sycamore. Trout spawned in its waters, and grizzly bears roamed its shores in search of food. The river and its adjacent woodlands helped support one of the largest concentrations of indigenous peoples in North America, and it also largely determined the location of the first Spanish Pueblo and ultimately the city of Los Angeles. The river was also the city’s sole source of water for more than a century before flood-control projects made the L.A. River what it is today.  Michael Kolster, in L.A. River, relies on a nineteenth-century photographic technology to render the Los Angeles River today, from its headwaters in Canoga Park and the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley to its mouth at the Pacific Ocean in Long Beach. Coincidentally, the founding of the city of Los Angeles and California’s achievement of statehood in 1850 coincide historically with the invention of the wet-plate photographic process, forever linking the city and state with the centrality of photography. The moving images that define L.A. River show a feature of the city’s landscape that initially attracted native peoples to its banks and gave rise to the formation of our nation’s second-largest city.  Channeled in concrete during the last century to control flooding, the river was all but removed from the life of the city until the turn of the twenty-first century, when concerted efforts were made by some to peel back some of the concrete and to let nature live once again. In his photographic journey, Kolster considers both the past and present and how the accumulation of life along the river suggests a larger a role for the L.A. River in the lives of the city’s inhabitants.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51127124230417,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51127124623633,"sku":"NIN9781938086649","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1938086643.jpg?v=1751250955"},{"product_id":"mongrels-of-our-making-book-michael-kolster-9781960521095","title":"Mongrels of Our Making","description":"Hawaiʻi’s “Big Island” is a place created by fire, being formed entirely from volcanic activity. Currently, it is home to four active volcanoes. The Big Island is also, due to its position relative to the North Pacific trash gyre, home to large amounts of plastic debris that ocean currents deposit on its shores, particularly on its remote southeastern areas such as Kamilo Beach. Much effort has been made to remove this debris, with a fair amount of success, but the flow of trash onto the beaches continues unabated, and keeping these beaches clean a never-ending task. Does clearing the beaches of plastic waste, only to bury it elsewhere, actually help? As plastic washes up on an island so recently formed from volcanic activity, we are reminded that everything there, including all forms and traces of life, must have come from somewhere else.   Photographer Michael Kolster became interested in the issue of plastic debris on Kamilo Beach through a paper from the Geological Society of America whose authors claimed that the plastic debris, when melted or otherwise combined with rocks on the beach, would probably enter the fossil record to become a horizon marker for the Anthropocene. Dubbed “plastiglomerates” by geologists, these hybrid “stones” are the product of humans burning plastic, whether intentionally or accidentally, that then melts and become fused with the naturally-occurring rocks that were created by volcanoes. These fusions of human and geological activity form a fossil-like record of present-day human activity that is likely to persist for thousands of millennia due to their prevalence, location, and composition.   Wanting to see these plastiglomerates for himself, Kolster traveled to Hawaiʻi, where he photographed Kamilo Beach and its plastiglomerates. He also collected examples of plastiglomerates that he took back to his studio in Maine. Kolster’s photographs of the plastiglomerates, both in Hawai‘i and collected at home, show both the harsh reality and surprising beauty of plastic trash from the beaches of a Pacific paradise. While this trash can be viewed as both an eyesore and an insult to our ideas of what a tropical paradise like Hawai‘i should be, Kolster also shows how seeing plastic on the beach is equivalent to looking in the mirror: We need to look closer at our reflection before impulsively wiping it clean, only to have to do it over and over day after day, week after week, endlessly.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53011020480785,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53011020546321,"sku":"NIN9781960521095","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781960521095.jpg?v=1768012668"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-ie\/collections\/author-books-by-michael-kolster.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}