Badlands: A Geography of Metaphors

Foreword by Ross King, New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Governor General’s Award. There can be few places in the world where the visual impact of the landscape is as hauntingly captivating as the Badlands of the Northern Great Plains. Encompassing Alberta, Saskatchewan, North Dakota and Montana, these amazing regions contain some of the most surreal and magical terrain you can imagine. Renowned photographer and painter Ken Dalgarno first visited Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta more or less out of curiosity, he writes. But I was instantly struck by the mystical hoodoos, spires, and other mesmerizing geological wonders. It felt like I was walking amongst a geography of metaphors, or perhaps entering an archives where stories have been exiled.
A treasure trove for dinosaur fossils and First Nations history, the Badlands, Ken continues, are certainly a place where the past has invaded the present. Like finding a great writer, I wanted to read more. The result of my explorations is this photographic survey of the Badlands of the Northern Great Plains.
Covering eleven unique Badland regions this book provides a living photographic portrait of some of the most intriguing and least understood places on Earth – North America’s mysterious Badlands. Below are the 11 regions: Avonlea Badlands SaskatchewanBig Muddy Badlands SaskatchewanRoche Percee SaskatchewanKilldeer Badlands SaskatchewanDinosaur Provincial Park AlbertaCottonwood Trail Alberta Drumheller Alberta Red Rock Coulee Alberta Writing-On-Stone Provincial Park AlbertaTheodore Roosevelt National Park North Dakota Makoshika State Park MontanaPhotographs from the book are being exhibited at the Francis Morrison Library Gallery, Saskatoon from April 15th to May 21st 2015.