Promotional Information

Martin Hogue's deceptively simple portrayal of American campgrounds gives pause for thought about a common landscape form that is at best taken for granted and often disparaged. He underscores how these places are supposed to be an antidote for everyday routines but have become places that replicate many of the amenities of daily life. Text and image combine to provide an engaging and provocative commentary on leisure as many people know it today. -- Richard Longstreth, Professor of American Studies, George Washington University Thirtyfour Campgrounds patiently peers into apparent voids within the constructed environments of camp culture to reveal the absent presence underlying organized outdoor recreation. Taking cues from Ed Ruscha's Thirtyfour Parking Lots and Dan Graham's Homes for America, Hogue finds between the ghostly forensics of every filmstrip frame, even those unexposed, a nuanced palette of seasonal differentiation and a call for deeper examination of transit, communication, and geography in crafting American campgrounds and built environments. -- Chris Taylor, Director of Land Arts of the American West, Texas Tech University A contemporary and compelling meta-typological portrait of the American landscape, exploring the interface between representational information-space and unique physical locations. The book is about its subject, but is also a work of landscape photography and land art, uncannily integrating site, nonsite, website, and campsite. -- Matthew Coolidge, Director, Center for Land Use Interpretation

About the Author

Martin Hogue teaches landscape architecture in the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at the State University of New York, Syracuse.

Reviews

A landscape architect meticulously depicts the intersection of Americans' desire to commune with nature with their devotion to their stuff—and hence the rituals of parking trailers, service hook-ups (today including WiFi), setting out lawn chairs, and more. Forget about traveling light.
*Harvard Magazine*

The images in Thirtyfour Campgrounds, supported by Hogue's timeline of diagrams, show how we've slowly brought that life along with us. Clean restrooms, orderly tables, and, yes, wi-fi, are all available, and Thirtyfour Campgrounds explores how our desire for these amenities in the great outdoors has created a distinct form of landscape to be consumed.
*Hyperallergic*

In this photographic and typological survey of American campsites, Hogue masterfully dissects the paradox of the contemporary campground, a plot not found on the trail but reserved online, and increasingly offering comforts and amenities that undermine any concept of the rustic.
*Publishers Weekly*