The University Press of Kentucky commissioned the poet and essayist Wendell Berry to write a book arguing for the preservation of the Red River Gorge in its natural state, and engaged the Lexington photographer to make the pictures that accompany the text. The book gathers a long piece of nature writing and forty-eight plates; in words and in images the gorge is observed over the course of a year, through the four seasons. Located in eastern Kentucky, home to 26,000 acres of untamed river, rock formations, historical sites, unusual vegetation and wildlife, the gorge was threatened by a man-made lake planned by the Army Corps of Engineers, and the book contributed to saving it. Meatyard’s pictures are among the first photographic attempts at environmental conservation in the American South. "No place is to be learned like a textbook," Berry writes, revealing the gorge’s corners and crevices, its ridges and rapids.