Getting Your Hands on Wells Tower Everything Ravaged Everything Burned
Most people who ask about this are looking for a copy of Wells Tower's 2015 photography monograph, and they run into the same problems within the first five minutes of searching. The book was published by Damiani and it went through multiple printings. The first edition sold out fast because Tower's name carried weight after Animals came out, and the demand never really dropped. You're going to see it listed everywhere from AbeBooks to eBay to Amazon Marketplace, and the prices vary wildly depending on condition and printing. I started tracking down copies around 2016 when I was researching photographic techniques for a commercial project involving abandoned structures. I needed reference material and decided to grab a copy rather than dig through individual images online. What I found was that the second printing had noticeably different paper stock than the first. The first run used a heavier coated paper that made the black levels in images like the Chernobyl and Fukushima spreads hit much harder. The later printings shifted to a lighter stock that some people prefer for readability, but it flattens the contrast in the darker frames. This matters more than you'd expect if you're using the book for reference work.
Downloading Wells Tower Everything Ravaged Everything Burned
There isn't an official PDF released by Damiani or the author, so any site offering a direct download is hosting something unofficial. I've seen people push files from various torrent sites and file lockers, but the scan quality on most of those is uneven. Some pages come through crisp while others are blurry or have visible scanner artifacts. If you need a digital copy for quick reference, a used hardcover from a reputable seller in good condition is usually worth more than whatever scan you'll find online. That said, if you absolutely need a portable version, I ended up scanning my own copy with a Plustek OpticFilm 7600i and a Epson Perfection V850 Pro for the flat artwork. The results were clean enough that I could zoom in on texture details without degradation. The book itself contains roughly 200 pages of photography with essays by various contributors. Tower's work focuses on ruined and abandoned places, and the images span from post-Soviet architecture to abandoned theme parks to war zones. The layout is large format, so the pages don't translate well to small screens on a phone. You really need to view this at a decent resolution if you're treating it as a reference document. I learned this the hard way after buying a Kindle edition from a third-party reseller that had the pages shrunk down to fit a 6-inch screen. The detail in the Fujisawa Shell Park photograph was completely lost at that size. Here's something most guides won't tell you about working with Tower's photography in a practical sense. When you're using these images for reference or trying to replicate the lighting conditions he captured, the single biggest challenge is understanding what he shot with and when. Tower used a large format view camera for many of these images, mostly a 4x5 Linhof Technika. The depth of field he achieves in wide architectural shots is nearly impossible to replicate with a standard DSLR at normal focal lengths. If you're trying to match his approach on location, you need to be thinking in terms of tilt-shift movements and very small apertures, and even then you're still working against the ground glass preview issue.
I ran into a specific problem last year when I was trying to photograph an abandoned industrial site in Ohio that had structural damage similar to the Chernobyl shots in the book. I was shooting with a 24mm lens at f/16 and nothing was coming out sharp across the frame. The issue wasn't the camera or the lens, it was the combination of sensor format and focusing distance. With a full-frame camera and a wide lens at close focusing distance, the plane of sharpness doesn't behave the way you expect it to. I switched to a tilt-shift lens and used the Scheimpflug principle to align the focal plane with the angled floor of the building. The result was dramatically better, but it took three separate test shots and adjustments before I got it right. That's the kind of thing Tower's book doesn't explain because he's not writing a manual, but it's the practical gap most people hit when they try to apply his techniques. The downsides of this book as a reference tool are worth acknowledging. The essays are scattered and not always on the same page as the images they reference, which makes cross-referencing frustrating. The color calibration across different printings varies enough that matching a reproduction to the original negative would require careful side-by-side comparison. And if you're looking for geographic or chronological organization, you won't find it. The book is arranged thematically by type of location rather than by region or date, which works aesthetically but is inconvenient if you're researching something specific. For people who want a more practical alternative alongside the book, I'd recommend pairing it with Tower's Animals if you haven't read it yet. The earlier monograph gives you insight into his process with live subjects, and understanding that work changes how you read the subject matter in Everything Ravaged Everything Burned. You start noticing the compositional choices are the same even when the subject has shifted from living animals to abandoned buildings.
Get the Full Details
If you're on a tight budget, the used market is your best option. A good condition copy from a third-party seller on Amazon will usually run between thirty and fifty dollars. AbeBooks tends to have European listings with lower shipping costs if you're in the UK. Don't pay more than seventy dollars unless the copy is in near-mint condition with the original dust jacket intact. Those copies hold value better, but paying over that amount is overpaying for something that is fundamentally a reading object, not an investment piece.
