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Wild Visions
Written By: Lance Hardin - Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust | Issue: August 2024
The evocative works of George Masa will be explored and celebrated with this month’s Village Nature Series presentation – 5:30 P.M. August 20 in Lewis Hall at the Village Green. For more information go to hcltnc.org and villagegreencashiersnc.com.
Brent Martin
This month’s installment in the Village Nature Series is a lecture by Brent Martin who will be discussing his 2022 book “George Masa’s Wild Vision: A Japanese Immigrant Imagines Western North Carolina.”
The lecture will be on August 20 at 5:30 P.M. in Lewis Hall at the Village Green in Cashiers.
George Masa, sometimes referred to as the “Ansel Adams of the Smokies” was an enigmatic figure. Born in Japan, not much is known of his early life before his arrival in the United States in the early 20th century. Eventually Masa made his way to Asheville and found employment at the Grove Park Inn.
An indefatigable hiker with a passion for photography, he soon became known for his evocative photographs of the Great Smoky Mountains and western North Carolina. His pictures, accompanied by the prose of his friend Horace Kephart, were instrumental to the successful campaign for creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
In the 1920s Masa was lured to Highlands and Cashiers by Frank Cook, then manager of the Highlands Inn, who hoped that Masa photographs could provide a similar boost to his establishment.
In George Masa’s Wild Vision Brent Martin “explores the locations Masa visited, using first-person narratives to contrast, lament, and exalt the condition of the landscape the photographer so loved and worked to interpret and protect.” The book was honored with the Thomas Wolfe Award and was a finalist for the 2023 Philip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award by the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Martin’s poetry and essays have been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, Pisgah Review, Tar River Poetry, Chattahoochee Review, Eno Journal, New Southerner, Kudzu Literary Journal, Smoky Mountain News and elsewhere. His books include The Changing Blue Ridge Mountains: Essays on Journeys Past and Present and A Hiker’s Guide to the Bartram National Recreation Trail in Georgia and North Carolina. He is the Executive Director of the Blue Ridge Bartram Trail Conservancy and lives in the Cowee community where he and his wife, Angela Faye Martin, run Alarka Institute.
The Village Nature Series is a program co-founded and administered by the Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust and The Village Green and sponsored by Cedar Creek Club.
