Over 50-plus years, the documentarian Robert Gardner has chronicled the everyday lives of people from the Dani of West New Guinea (the subject of his best-known work, Dead Birds) to the holy men of Benares, India (in the rapturous, Antonioni-esque Forest of Bliss). These journals, reissued in a fine hardcover edition, show Gardner as a restrained, unsentimental, and talented prose writer reminiscent of J.M. Coetzee, and the photographs scattered among his thoughts are refreshingly unvarnished.