Great Salt Lake Portfolio with forward by Wallace Stegner

Included in the exhibit is one of the remaining sets of The Great Salt Lake Portfolio, which was originally produced in 1979 and includes a forward by Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner, often called "The Dean of Western Writers." Five years after his death, a book of Stegner's major writings was published by his son Page. Included in the book is an essay entitled "Xanadu By The Salt Flats." The last paragraph reads in part:

Early in 1980 a Salt Lake City photographer, John Telford, produced a portfolio of ten Great Salt Lake prints that capture miraculously the moody light and startling contrasts of a lake that belongs on the moon. There is not a human being in any of the photographs, nothing but sand, salt, water as shining and heavy as mercury, islands like jutting bones. As an introduction to his own splendid images, Mr. Telford has inserted a print made from a glass-plate negative by C.R. Savage. It is a print of superb quality from a superb negative, and it shows the Saltair pavilion as it looked around 1905... It looks very much like the Saltair that I knew in 1924: if there are differences, I don't want to know about them. Because this is a picture of perfection, in its way.