Take Me to the River: Photographs of Atlantic Rivers by Michael Kolster

Kolster, Michael; Nordstrom, Alison Devine; Klingle, Mathew W.

ISBN 10: 1938086422 / ISBN 13: 9781938086427

Published by George F Thompson Publishing, Staunton, VA, 2016

About this Item

Large Square Quarto. Hardcover. Pictorial boards in b&w jacket. 239 pages : illustrations (chiefly black and white) ; 31 x 30 cm. "In Take Me to the River, Michael Kolster explores four American rivers that flow into the Atlantic Ocean--the Androscoggin, Schuylkill, James, and Savannah--as they emerge from two centuries of industrial use and neglect. Even as these well-known rivers still carry the legacies of longstanding pollution in their currents and sediments, thanks to the Clean Water Act of 1972, they have become renewed and rediscovered waterways that our grandparents never could have envisioned. Kolster's new book is a masterful presentation of dramatic yet understated photographs of these rivers, from their source to the sea. In the spirit of nineteenth-century photographers such as Louis Daguerre, Henry Talbot Fox, and Timothy O'Sullivan, they were made using the wet-plate photographic process, in a portable darkroom Kolster set up along the banks and overlooks of these rivers. The chemical slurries that develop and fix the image on the glass plate actually mimic the movements of a river's current, and the idiosyncratic qualities of Kolster's ambrotypes harken back to the historical coincidence of the dawn of photography and the industrialization of Europe and America. With the reality of a changing global climate and consensus building about the extent that humans are responsible, Take Me to the River challenges us to set aside our blinders of wanting to see these riverine landscapes as either pure or despoiled. As the boundaries between the human and the natural are increasingly entangled, Kolster's photographs suggest how we can embrace, even cherish, places once degraded and ignored that have become, in their own way, alluring."--Publisher. VG-. Ex-art library, minimally marked as such, with only a sticker on the spine and rear paste down. Some hard bumping to fore edge corners. Light scuffing to jacket.

Seller Inventory # 205173

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Take Me to the River: Photographs of Atlantic Rivers by Michael Kolster
• Publisher: George F Thompson Publishing, Staunton, VA
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1938086422
• ISBN 13: 9781938086427
• Binding: Hardcover
• Seller catalogs:
  • Photography

About this title

Synopsis

Take Me to the River explores four post-industrial rivers that flow into the Atlantic Ocean―the Androscoggin (Maine/New Hampshire), Schuylkill (Pennsylvania), James (Virginia), and Savannah (Georgia/South Carolina)―as they emerge from two centuries of use and neglect. With vastly improved water quality in each river since enactment of the 1972 Clean Water Act, public affection has gradually increased as memories of foul smells and fetid water fade. Today, these rivers still carry the legacies of longstanding pollution in their currents and sediments, yet they have become waterways, renewed and rediscovered, that our grandparents never could have envisioned. Take Me to the River comprises four portfolios of ambrotypes of these rivers, from source to sea. Three extensive essays offer different perspectives on ways of seeing and thinking about these places: one by the photographer on the collodion process; a historical view by Alison Nordstrom, the former Senior Curator of Photography at the George Eastman House, on the importance of Kolster's work; and an environmental history of Atlantic rivers by the noted historian Matthew Klingle. Kolster's dramatic yet understated photographs were made in a portable darkroom set up along the banks of the rivers with the wet-plate photographic process, a nineteenth-century method famously used to document the battlefields of the Civil War and the great vistas of the far American West. The chemical slurries that develop and fix the image on the glass plate mimic the movements of a river's current, and the idiosyncratic qualities of the ambrotypes reference the historical coincidence of the dawn of photography and the industrialization of Europe and America. With consensus building about our changing climate and the extent humans are responsible, these four Atlantic rivers challenge us to set aside our usual blinders of seeing the landscape as either pure or despoiled. As the boundaries between the human and the natural are increasingly entangled, these rivers suggest how we might embrace, even cherish, places once degraded and ignored.

About the Authors

Michael Kolster is a photographer and associate professor of art at Bowdoin College who, in 2013, was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Photography. His photographs have been featured in Loupe, the Journal of the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, Memorious, and Consilience―The Journal of Sustainability, and they are in the collections of the Capital One Financial Corporation, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, and Polaroid Corporation, among others. Kolster has numerous solo and two-person exhibitions, including those at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Page Bond Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, SRO Gallery at Texas Tech University, Schroeder Romero and Shredder Gallery in New York City, and 621 Gallery in Tallahassee, Florida.

Alison Nordström is an independent scholar, writer, and curator based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1991 to 2002, she was Founding Director and Senior Curator of the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach Florida, and, from 2004 to 2013, was Senior Curator of Photographs at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. She is currently Curator for International Programs at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Artistic Director of the Lodz (Poland) Fotofestiwal, and a Scholar-in-Residence in the Graduate Department of Photography at Lesley University. She has curated more than 100 exhibitions of photography, including major surveys of landscape, portraiture, travel photographs, and journalism.

Matthew Klingle is an associate professor of history and environmental studies at Bowdoin College and the author of Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (Yale University Press, 2007), which received the biennial 2009 Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Klingle has received awards, fellowships, and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, American Society for Environmental History, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, Organization of American Historians, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Urban History Association, and Western History Association.