Landscape Love Letters: An Appreciation of the Larry Ford Photographic Library

This essay, adapted from the APCG Presidential address delivered at the eighty-fourth annual APCG conference in Bellingham, Washington, explores the substantial legacy of Larry Ford as an author and photographer. Ford's extensive research publications profoundly influenced the thinking, and indeed the career trajectory, of numerous geographers, including the author. Ford's corpus of landscape geography photography is perhaps the equal of his text-based works and is the most important photographic collection housed in the Geography Department at California State University, Northridge. To demonstrate the value of the collection, several sample images from the Ford photography collection are considered from a landscape geography perspective.