..".Entrancing photographs of multi-colored mudhills in New Mexico, the red rock formations of Canyonlands National Park in Utah, and canyons, cliffs, and desert lands throughout California, Nevada, and Arizona. Strom has been photographing the deserts of the American Southwest for thirty years, creating arresting images of forbidding, breathtaking landscapes containing geological formations and striking colors like nothing else on earth... His book of photographs would make the perfect gift for anyone who loves the landscape of the West."--"New West Magazine"

Stephen Strom has photographed in the southwestern desert lands of the United States for more than 20 years and this book brings together, for the first time, a selection of his most powerful and memorable images.

Strom brings to this landscape the sensibilities of an astronomer who has lived in the desert for almost two decades. His photographs capture a land shaped both by the millennial forces of prehistory and also by yesterday's cloudburst. His images have the power to compress vast desert spaces in an illusion of intimacy and comprehension, presenting undulations of colour and form which appear reimagined in a light that at once penetrates and sculpts.

Published in 2009, the book Earth Forms, with essays by Gregory McNamee and Albert Stewart, is the first fine art quality monograph of Stephen's photographs. To assure images of the highest quality, Stephen was present at EBS in Verona, Italy when the final proofs were made. He and Dewi Lewis, the publisher, certified the adjustments made before each page was printed.

Full-color images by renowned photographers Stephen Strom and Stephen Capra unite with text by prizewinning nature and geography writer Gregory McNamee to document the subtle landscape of 1.2 million acres of remote Chihuahuan Desert grassland in southern New Mexico. Home to many species of wildlife and native plants, Otero Mesa is a place of extraordinary beauty and ecological significance faced with the increasing threat of oil and gas development that has plagued the Rocky Mountain West.

"It is a strange and empty place, a place whose contours suggest that those who do not know it are best to leave it alone, as those who do know it will do in all events. And, as with all strange and empty places in this increasingly crowded, increasingly monocultural world, Otero Mesa is an important island in our geography of hope, a place that warrants concern and protection. Rightly, for it is very much under threat."--Gregory McNamee in "Otero Mesa"

"My house is the red earth; it could be the center of the world." This is Navajo country, a land of mysterious and delicate beauty. "Stephen Strom's photographs lead you to that place," writes Joy Harjo. "The camera eye becomes a space you can move through into the powerful landscapes that he photographs. The horizon may shift and change all around you, but underneath it is the heart with which we move." Harjo's prose poems accompany these images, interpreting each photograph as a story that evokes the spirit of the Earth. Images and words harmonize to evoke the mysteries of what the Navajo call the center of the world.

America. Located about 150 miles (241 kilometers) west of Las Vegas near the border of California and Nevada, it straddles an area of about 3,000 square miles (770 square kilometers). A land of extremes and contrasts, it includes Telescope Peak that towers over the valley at 11,049 feet elevation (3,367 meters) and an oasis that provides habitat for the endangered Devils Hole Pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis). Designated a national monument in 1933 and expanded into a national park in 1994, its rugged yet otherworldly beautiful landscape now attracts more than 1,000,000 visitors per year. Attracted by the distinctive topography and light of Death Valley, Stephen Strom, a renowned professor of astrophysics, began regularly traveling there some thirty-five years ago. His acute eye for abstract, almost pointillist compositions not only reveals the patterns and effects of geologic forces over millennia, but it also takes in the vast, colorful sweep of land and sky as well as the land's myriad details-volcanic cinder cones and sand dunes, dry lakes and salt pans, colorful badlands and canyons, and pine-studded mountains-that give the area its distinctive and varied character. Strom's photographs are complemented by Alison Hawthorne Deming's original sequence of poems, written for this book, that are as luminous and detailed as the images themselves. And Rebecca A. Senf's perceptive essay situates Strom's work within the canon of those photographers who have inspired and mentored him, including Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Keith McElroy, Eliot Porter, Frederic Sommer, and Max Yavno. Death Valley: Painted Light is a book unlike any other about a landscape whose topographic relief and sheer beauty are unforgettable.

Tidal Rhythms: Change and Resilience at the Edge of the Sea is a collaborative effort by photographer Stephen Strom and award-winning essayist Barbara Hurd. Strom's images, taken along beaches in the Gulf of California and the Northern California and Oregon coasts, document a world teeming with ancient life-forms, clinging to rocks and finding nourishment but revealed for only a few hours before the tidal waters return. The primitive flora and fauna together create transient marine landscapes whose complex patterns resonate with what we humans perceive as beauty. Following the rhythms of Strom's images as they travel between intimate portraits and expansive vistas, Hurd's lyrical and philosophical essays both continue and complicate those cadences as she explores not just resonance, but also disturbance. As artist and writer move us from high tide to low tide and from the panoramic to the minuscule and back again, the reader is confronted with the larger issues of what happens as the seas rises, warms, and acidifies. Tidal zones are one of the first landscapes to be threatened-almost invisibly-by global climate change. Mussels, barnacles, and tidal pools are flung and ruffled or warmed and acidified in ways that stress the lives of those who live there. Shells begin to thin, species migrate north, and habitats literally disappear, yet few people are even aware of these amazing environments. Change, of course, is part of an ancient pattern. For billions of years, the sea has risen and fallen, and life-forms have managed to adapt or not. But the current pace of change confronts us with a new and urgent question: Can the long-established but delicately balanced worlds between tidelines evolve rapidly enough to enable continued sustenance and maybe even a new beauty? In Tidal Rhythms, we are given the gift of a new world-view.