California brings together Bob Kolbrener’s black-and-white photographs made between 1968 and 2019. Mountains, coastal rock, desert plants and changing weather form a sustained study of the state. The preview sequence moves between wide views and concentrated observations: a tree against open sky, the structure of a cactus, surf breaking over rock. These shifts allow the landscape to be read through individual forms as well as through the scale of the terrain.

Kolbrener’s commitment to landscape developed after he encountered Ansel Adams’s photographs in Yosemite in 1968. He subsequently studied and worked with Adams, while maintaining a commercial photography business in St. Louis. His practice uses film and large-format cameras, with darkroom prints made on fiber-based paper using tray processing and selenium toner. These methods describe the photographic originals; the book translates that work into printed pages. Curator Gary F. Kurutz contributes the introductory essay.

Published by Nazraeli Press in 2022, this hardcover has 78 pages. The displayed openings place photographs within broad white margins, sometimes pairing two images and sometimes leaving the facing page blank. The changes between single pictures and pairs shape the pace of reading. Dark branches, pale clouds and textured surfaces remain distinct, while neighboring photographs invite comparisons of line, light and structure. The sequence gives room to both dramatic weather and quieter details.

For readers following American landscape photography, the book offers a long view of one photographer’s engagement with California. Its interest lies in the continuity of that attention across several decades, rather than in a single journey or location. Repeated viewing can shift attention from recognizable scenery to the decisions that organize each photograph. This record describes the ordinary hardcover edition, whose value as a reading object rests in bringing an extended body of work into a compact, revisitable sequence.