Montana Outdoors Magazine - Nov.-Dec. 2023
Few images capture the grandeur of Montana—big sky, big land, big mountains, big everything—as well as Bozeman photographer Craig Hergert’s panoramic photographs. In his newest coffee-table book, Hergert takes viewers on a journey to 26 areas from Glacier National Park to Ekalaka. We almost don’t want to recommend this stunning photography collection, because anyone who sees it will want to immediately move to Montana.

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– Big Sky Journal  Renowned landscape photographer Craig W. Hergert and award-winning American poet and novelist Shann Ray have released their anticipated collaboration, Montana Panoramic: Transparent in the Backlight. The sweeping new collection marries a 15-year retrospective of Hergert’s never-before-seen panoramas with Ray’s poetry and prose, honoring the full complexity of the Montana landscape — which is, in turn, a profound echo of the American landscape — fraught with difficulty, troubled by questions of atonement, and sanctified by the nascent wisdom in making things right. The book’s literary and visual vignettes depict the region’s distinctive people and places through a lens intent on light: its beauty and slant across epic vistas, its properties in the human face, its relationship to the powerful starlit skies of Montana at night.

Craig Hergert is a Montana-based freelance photographer whose work appears in galleries and businesses throughout the country and in private collections internationally. His highly acclaimed previous collections — Montana: Skiing the Last Best Place, with foreword by Warren Miller, and Montana Panoramic Volume 1: 1997-2007 — are in their second and third printings, respectively.

Shann Ray’s deeply engaging work examines humanity’s relationship with violence, love, and forgiveness. Born and raised in Montana, Ray is the winner of an American Book Award, among numerous other accolades, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and the author of a libretto and 15 books, including Atomic Theory 7, American Masculine, and The Souls of Others. His esteemed work has been widely featured in respected periodicals and publications worldwide.

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– Outside Bozeman - They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but with Craig Hergert’s collection of photos in Montana Panoramic: Transparent in the Backlight (Great Wide Open Publishing, $85) only a few are necessary—“stunning,” “encompassing,” and “alive” are some that come to mind. These photos, combined with Shann Ray’s elegant narrative expression, show Montana in a way that we can all relate to, as if we are really there. Together, Craig and Shann take you across the Big Sky state, corner to corner, telling the story of Montana using brilliant photography and thought-provoking stories and poems. Taste the dust from the dirt roads in the Highwood Mountains, feel the warm steam of the Grand Prismatic in Yellowstone, smell the sun-baked wheat growing in Plentywood, and hear the crowd roar as a cowboy holds tight to a bucking bronc. The shots of Bozeman and familiar mountain ranges evoke feelings of homeyness, while new vantages summon wonder and an inspiration to discover what the reader has not yet seen. This book is a great way to take the epic expanses of Montana home, right to your living room, for you to relive with the turn of a page.

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– Carrie Scozzaro, The Pacific Northwest Inlander - When most of us have given ourselves over to sleep, Shann Ray is giving himself over to the process of writing. More often than not, Ray writes in pencil on a piece of plain white paper, typically between 10 pm and 1 am, knowing he can work through the darkness into the dawn as needs demand.

“There’s an ancient idea that ‘God dwells in the thick darkness,'” says Ray, who teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University. “An elegant notion,” he says, his eyes flashing, a smile resting on the right side of his mouth.

“All ancient traditions honor light. Of course, without light none of us would be here,” adds Ray, whose work often explores both the dichotomy of good and evil and the permeable membrane between these inextricable forces.

His process is nonlinear, Ray says. His work includes poetry like Atomic Theory 7, prose like the award-winning American Copper, and scholarly works. The form might be secondary to the content that moves him, including his beloved former home of Montana.

“I think more of music and rhythms: water, land and sky,” Ray says. 

Ray recently completed two works. The Souls of Others is a collection of essays, poems and other writings, some of which have appeared in such publications as LitHub, High Desert Journal, and the Inlander. Montana Panoramic: Transparent in the Backlight is a collaboration with Bozeman-based photographer Craig Hergert that focuses Ray’s attention to light, both its physical manifestation of epic vistas and its metaphoric potential.

“Transparent in the Backlight is meant to honor the full complexity of the Montana landscape, which is a real echo of the American landscape,” Ray says, adding that the subject is “fraught with questions and difficulty, the concepts of making things right, the concepts of atonement… life and relationships, forgiveness… love.”

The 402-page hardcover book begins the visual journey near the Bozeman-area Missouri River headwaters prominent in so many historical narratives, and one of many places Ray lived in his youth. It follows the Yellowstone River east, moving counterclockwise through the state.

Along the way, Ray’s words offer a sense of the people who might inhabit these lands.

“If a person reads the poems that run through this whole book, it reads like the story of a human family humbly in the natural world,” Ray says. The book is both poetic and oblique, and although not a novel, it definitely has a beginning, middle and end, Ray says.

“I hope it takes people down into the depth of our ability to love and our ability to fracture and our ability to come back to one another.”

The book concludes with a quick visual trip down Montana’s western flank to Dillon, site of the infamous Big Hole Massacre. For most of the book, Hergert already had images, but after reading Ray’s essay on the Big Hole, Hergert knew he needed to re-shoot something to match the emotion of Ray’s writing.

Ray’s “In the Heart of the Mountains” recounts the atrocities that befell the Nez Perce at the Big Hole, where U.S. troops slaughtered as many as 90 tribal members, mostly women and children. Chief Joseph escaped, however, and in recent times, a female member of his tribal lineage, Deer Park resident Robbie Paul, together with her father, has attended the Nez Perce reconciliation ceremony at the site of the massacre. Today, the Nez Perce invite descendants of the military who committed the atrocity to walk with the descendants of those who were massacred at the Big Hole. They carry lanterns together through the darkness and at sunrise there is a healing and forgiveness ceremony at the site.

A person can pick up the book and look at great pictures, Ray says, “but if they want to read through it, they’ll get a not only a bear attack, and fishing, they’ll receive an initial understanding of genocidal history and the nature of forgiveness inside Montana and America, which is a gift.”