Barbara Bosworth

Born: 1953

Biography:

Barbara Bosworth is an American artist, educator, and photographer. Bosworth works primarily with a large-format, 8x10 view camera and focuses on the relationship between humans and nature. Her works have been included in magazines, journals, books and permanent collections, and shown in solo exhibits nationally and internationally.
Bosworth was born in 1953 in Cleveland, Ohio and grew up in Novelty, Ohio. She studied at Bowling Green State University, where she received her B.A. in Fine Arts in 1975. She earned an M.F.A. in photography at Rochester Institute of Technology in 1983.
Bosworth worked briefly as a visiting instructor at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, before joining the photography faculty at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Massachusetts in 1984. In 1985, Bosworth won a Guggenheim fellowship for her photographic work. She has been professor and Chair of the Photography Department at Massachusetts College of Art.
Bosworth grew up surrounded by trees, plants, and the outdoors. She creates her views of the natural world using a large-format film camera, exploring subtle relations between humans and landscapes, "unfolding a personal and spiritual connection to the world around us." According to Andy Grundberg, writing in Grand Street, her peers in landscape photography include Laura McPhee, Lois Connor, Terry Evans, Linda Halverson, and Mary Peck, among others.
Much of Barbara Bosworth’s photographic work focuses on landscapes and trees. She spent several months intensively photographing the New England Trail, and over fourteen years visiting and photographing large trees from the National Register.
In other photographs such as Indigo Bunting she captures fleeting moments of connection between birds and humans, "incredibly intimate moment of contact" with the tiny creatures appearing "exceptionally vulnerable." Bosworth documents the American landscape and how it is affected by humans.
Bosworth captures details using a view camera, and she often creates diptychs and triptychs from a set of exposures, expanding the area of her images. In her series Birds and Other Angels, the triptych format places her photographs of birds and humans within the wider scope of the forest surrounding them. Although Bosworth works in color, she also frequently shoots in black and white, intentionally limiting the image to forms shown in tones of grey, undistracted by color. In her twenty-year retrospective Natural Histories: Photographs by Barbara Bosworth, about three quarters of the photographs are in black and white and one quarter were in color.
In a San Francisco MoMA interview, Bosworth asserts that her processes are slowed down due to the use of film, and that the care and thoughtfulness put into her work increases with that time. She takes her time carefully studying the landscapes, which primarily consists of forests, birds, and the people her work has crossed paths with. Like other landscape photographers, Bosworth’s asserted interest is in exploring the world at her own pace and appreciating what nature puts in front of her. She believes that observation is necessary to the artistic process and end product.
Although she examines what appears before her in the natural world, Bosworth’s chosen subject matter remains very personal and depicts specific moments that she has experienced. Her first photographs in and around her home in Ohio were taken from her rectangular living room window, looking out into the Ohio forest. Although her earliest photographs rarely included humans, she increasingly focused on people's connection to and effects on the surrounding environment, and she often mentions her parents and her upbringing as influences. Bosworth’s mother developed Parkinson's disease and dementia, while her father passed away from old age. Bosworth was able to channel these experiences into her work, drawing on them as an inspiration for her book Behold (2014): "Photography is our validation that we were there."
Bosworth’s work was exhibited in the fall of 2014 at the Datz Museum in SinSeong Gol, Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea. This work was collected and bound by the museum’s Datz Press, into the book Behold. Bosworth’s photographs connected tall, ancient tree stands with people, animals, streams that seem to flow through nature with time. The exhibition had its opening reception on October 11, 2014.
About Behold, Bosworth states:
When my mother was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and a bit of dementia, she would often reach out her hands into the air. As if she was trying to catch something from heaven. A few years ago, when my father was dying, our family gathered around his bedside. When my mother reached for something in the air, I asked her what she was reaching out for and she replied, "Oh, the birds!" I knew then, my bird photographs were for my mother and father. About holding on and letting go. About the moment the bird flies away.

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