The Wild & Precious works bring together treasures from a series of road trips traveled over 5 years by photographer Jesse Burke and his daughter Clover to explore the natural world. To encourage a connection between his child and nature, Burke used these adventures to give her an education that he considers essential—one that develops appreciation, respect, conservation, and self-confidence. Together this father-and-daughter team studied beaches, land, sky, and animals. While on the road, they documented the routes they drove, the landscapes they discovered, the creatures they encountered, even the roadside motels where they slept. This book is as much about love and parenting as it is a hands-on training manual of new age environmentalism. Wild & Precious reveals the fragile, complicated relationship that humans share with nature and serves as a call to arms for parents and children everywhere: Get outside! Bookended by poetic letters the two wrote to one another, Wild & Precious is a modern-day love story between parent and child, natural world and society. Burke writes, “I want my children to genuinely understand how magical the world we inhabit is and how we, as humans, are an integral part of the system. I want them to feel a deep connection to every aspect of their surroundings."
Published by Daylight Books. Texts by Karen Irvine, Chief Curator and Deputy Director, MoCP at Columbia College, Chicago, author Ben Hewitt and artist Dallas Clayton. Letters by Jesse and Clover Burke. 128 pages, hardcover. 134 four-color plates. Custom camouflage linen dust jacket.
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“Burke’s book is a wondrous work. His photos are all the more powerful because they show the discomfort and sometimes pain that children and the rest of us experience in nature, along with ecstatic joy.” — Richard Louv, author of The Nature Principle and Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder
“...Burke’s pictures have a lyricism and grace that reflect the duo’s close relationship with each other and with nature…”, — American Photo Magazine, Best Photo Books of the Year, December 2015
“...serves as a touching visual lesson to parents about the importance of providing children with the opportunities to understand and fully immerse themselves in nature...", — Juxtapoz
“...elevates his five-year personal narrative of fatherhood into a poetic collection of small stories that reveal the complexity and fragility of childhood and the importance of a relationship with nature.”, — Lenscratch