A 1964 Grand Canyon National Park brochure was the first piece photographer Brian Kelley purchased, marking the beginning of a multi-year hunt to piece together a visual history of the United States National Parks. The culmination of this search is Parks, a new hardcover book published by Standards Manual—the second collaboration between the two New York-based entities.
Featuring over 300 pieces of national parks brochures, maps, and general ephemera spanning over 100 years, the minimalist book showcases a nearly a century of anonymous art, cartography, graphic design, and printed materials. These everyday, oft-overlooked materials act as entry points for exploration of the larger topic—and when viewed as a whole, tell a unique story about both the individual places they reference and the time in which they were created.
As a publication dedicated to the intersection of good design and the great outdoors, Parks feels like it was created specifically for us. And, as luck would have it, Kelley is close pals with a few of the Field Mag crew, so we got in touch to dig a bit deeper into this new project.