Taschen and National Geographic chart a century of American transformation

William Albert Allard’s West Texas cowboy, suspended mid gallop across an immense prairie beneath mountains that fold into the horizon, carries the weight of an entire mythology. Shot in 1974, the photograph distils something elemental about the American frontier: the solitude, the scale, the romance of open land. It is one image among hundreds that Taschen has now assembled into a comprehensive volume of National Geographic photography spanning the past century.

National Geographic. The United States of America moves through the country with methodical grace, state by state, decade by decade. The collection unfolds as a visual argument about who Americans have been and who they have become. Allard himself would later reflect on this particular frame in the magazine’s October 2010 issue, recognising in it the wide open West that had long enraptured him. His observation speaks to the power of these images: they do not merely document landscape or incident, but capture something of the photographer’s own enchantment with the subject.

The book travels from Colorado’s ski slopes to New Orleans’ jazz bars, from the Hollywood Hills to a Kentucky barbershop. It moves through Manhattan’s Chinatown and lingers at a Mississippi river baptism. Rural America and burgeoning cities share the page; industrial advancement and evocative traditions exist side by side. What emerges is neither celebratory nor critical, but honest: a nation marked by constant motion, reinvention and contradictions held in careful balance.

Taschen’s production of National Geographic’s archive continues its long commitment to elevating photographic work into objects of contemplation. The publisher has long understood that such books demand precision in printing, paper and binding. National Geographic. The United States of America is available on TASCHEN.com and in selected stores.

Imagery courtesy of Taschen (@taschen).