An Underground Book Review: Upstream by McGuane & Lindsay

I largely avoid fly fishing coffee table books. The problem? Fly fishing picture books typically attain a kind of artificial beauty, and do so at the expense of spontaneity, realism or soul.

Images are carefully arranged, styled and colored – to the point I’m witnessing the product of an advertising shoot instead of a real moment on the water.

I don’t need to see another red-shirted fly fisher, perfect loop unrolling in a strategically placed dark spot. Or another digital image so oversaturated the angler’s skin glows yellow.

Or – god forbid – another grinning fool holding a big trout facing left, the Sage logo “illuminating” most of the image.

Going Upstream

I passed on Thomas McGuane and Charles Lindsay’s Upstream when it was published several years ago, a blunder I only recently corrected.

Want the one-word review? Stunning.

Lindsay’s black and white photographs bypass all the pretty-yet-distant cliches, displaying in their stead strong, reductive images where the elements of nature (water, air, fire, bugs, trout, etc) are dynamic – not fodder for a carefully arranged still life.

Through Lindsay’s lens, water becomes elemental and kinetic, with the surface boundary between air and stream displaying elements of both.

Trout ebb and flow through his photographs like elements of nature instead of targets, defined not by flashy parr marks or marketable colors, but revealed instead by a quiet swirl in the water or a taut piece of monofilament.

McGuane’s text is smart and cutting as ever, his status as keen observer of the natural world seemingly amplified by the B&W photographs.

M. and I were in a canyon that was sixty miles long. At its far side, the hills were scarred with clear-cuts. A local carpenter looking at the wind-blown and knot-infested trees said you couldn’t get a number-two board out of the whole forest. Nevertheless, someone had tried, and ended up putting the entire load on a train in Great Falls looking for a market that would accept it. The carpenter explained that this pretty forest might become fax paper. People could then send each other faxes about the beauty of nature.

Indeed, viewing McGuane’s text and Lindsay’s photographs in the same context exposes one of Upstream’s weaknesses – the images and words aren’t mixed together on the same pages, but are separated.

Many of Lindsay’s images would have piled meaning atop McGuane’s text (and vice versa), but instead, McGuane’s incisive words were left to fend for themselves, including the following passage – which would have soared off the page in the company of the right images:

Hard overhead light helps the hunting birds and sends the fish out of harm’s way under ledges, logs, brush, sargasso weed, ship’s hulls, mangroves, and rocks. Dawn and dusk, crepuscular light, is an open book and fish are emboldened by their own shadowlessness. The angler becomes still, watchful. Something is about to happen.

Several of Lindsay’s stronger images were photographed just under the surface of the water, then darkly and richly printed. The resulting pictures emphasize form over detail, revealing nature’s repeating forms.

In one instance, a cloud is juxtaposed with an image of water that is its twin.

In another, a campfire occupies one page while an equally hyperactive image of water occupies the other.

Nature, of course, isn’t the only subject of this book, and McGuane neatly exposes many of the excesses of modern fly fishing:

The professionalization of sport by Americans is well afield of the values from which sport originally sprung. There are few figures of absurdity to compete with today’s “fly fishing professional,” who arrives as a kind of booby prize in the general festivity of field sport. In some circles, the amateur angler is fully capable of outbursts of vainglory and self-aggrandizement, invidious comparison, blowhard posturing, and odious, self-infatuated crowing. He scarcely needs the help of a “professional.” Still, it is sad when a little spotted fish occasions frenzies of snobbery.

This is a book that has already been placed on my “A” shelf – the collection of volumes which will remain by my desk until I can no longer read.

I’d suggest it belongs on the shelves of others searching for a different view of fly fishing, water and nature, and dithering around until the book passed onto the “out of print” list means it’s available for 2/3 its $40 list price.

Who knew procrastination could be so profitable?

Several used copies are available via Amazon (one-click access via the link: Upstream: Fly-Fishing in the American West)

Of course, the Undergrounders are welcome to contribute their opinions; any raves, raspberries or contrasting reviews for Upstream?

[tags]upstream, thomas macguane, richard lindsay, fly fishing, trout, nature, book, publishing[/tags]