Pilgrim Eye

“The explorer travels to discover and investigate; the pilgrim travels and investigates to discover the sacred.”

David Halpern’s life and career span remarkable developments in the history of modern photography, from the introduction of Kodachrome film in 1936 to the current digital era. As a fine art and commercial photographer, perennial student and teacher with a passion for sharing, Halpern has embraced each new technology and applied them to a wide range of subjects.

In Pilgrim Eye, Halpern’s first book to showcase his award-winning fine art and landscape imagery, he provides a revealing glimpse into his lifelong journey of self-discovery. The book showcases 128 color and black-and-white photographs made over more than fifty years of pilgrimages across America—from the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee to Thomas Bay, Alaska, and from Acadia National Park in Maine to Joshua Tree National Park in the California desert. These stunning images are accompanied by the photographer’s self-revealing stories and thoughts, most of them pulled from his meticulously written and preserved journals.

Neither a how-to manual nor a traditional portfolio, Pilgrim Eye has been called by one reviewer “several books at once: a retrospective look at [Halpern’s] career as a landscape photographer, an artistic manifesto, and a kind of philosophical autobiography . . . as much fun to look at as it is to read.”

David Halpern's life and career span remarkable developments in the history of modern photography, from the introduction of Kodachrome film in 1936 to the current digital era. As a fine art and commercial photographer, perennial student and teacher with a passion for sharing, Halpern has embraced each new technology and applied them to a wide range of subjects.

In Pilgrim Eye, Halpern's first book to showcase his award-winning fine art and landscape imagery, he provides a revealing glimpse into his lifelong journey of self-discovery. The book showcases 128 color and black-and-white photographs made over more than fifty years of pilgrimages across America—from the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee to Thomas Bay, Alaska, and from Acadia National Park in Maine to Joshua Tree National Park in the California desert. These stunning images are accompanied by the photographer's self-revealing stories and thoughts, most of them pulled from his meticulously written and preserved journals.

David Halpern has served eleven times as a National Park Artist-in-Residence—at Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park and Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, Glacier National Park in Montana, and Acadia National Park in Maine. His work has been exhibited at museums and galleries across the country and has been featured in previous books, including Tulsa Art Deco: An Architectural Era. Halpern has taught photography for more than three decades, and he was a 2004 inductee in the Tulsa Historical Society Hall of Fame. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Bill Sontag a former National Park Superintendent, is a journalist, photographer, and freelance writer.