Barbara Bosworth

Barbara Bosworth (born 1953) is an American artist, educator, and photographer. She works primarily with a large-format, 8x10 view camera and focuses on the relationship between humans and nature. Bosworth's works have been included in magazines, journals, books and permanent collections, and shown in solo exhibits nationally and internationally. In 1985, she won a Guggenheim fellowship for her photographic work.

Early life and education Bosworth was born in 1953 surrounded by trees, plants, and the outdoors.

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.

Teaching career 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. 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."

She spent several months intensively photographing the New England Trail, with the tiny creatures appearing "exceptionally vulnerable." Bosworth documents the American landscape 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 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. She believes that observation is necessary to the artistic process and end product. "Photography is our validation that we were there."

Behold 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. This work is her tribute to the genre of Hudson River School style paintings, which have inspired her, and her piece View of the Oxbow from Dry Knob (2012) is a particular tribute to Thomas Cole’s famous painting The Oxbow.

Trees: national champions Many of Barbara Bosworth’s photographs focus on the landscapes of trees. Bosworth says trees "are rooted solidly in the earth but point ethereally toward the sky." "Champion trees" are notably the largest trees of each species according to the National Register of Big Trees, and are found in many different locations including backyards, street sides, mountains, and forests. In Trees: national champions, Bosworth documents the genera of the trees and also shows how their landscape changes from place to place. The trip was one day and one night long. During that evening, Bosworth created Nocturnal Voyage: The Morgan Series, which consists of five images of the dark sea.

The Heavens and The Sea

The Meadow was followed-up by two other books of large-format images of nature photographed with a 8x10 camera that reprise its exact book format, size, and design: The Heavens (2018) and The Sea (2022). The Heavens is based on a decade worth of large-format long-exposure photographs of the moon, sun and sky. The star photographs are hour-long exposures with the camera mounted on astronomical tracker so to render the stars are as dots rather than streaks. The sun and moon images are made by attaching a telescope to the camera. Like The Meadow, the book includes numerous inserts, including facsimile editions of three artist's books made as a nod to Galileo's publications. The Sea originates from the hours Bosworth'sspent with her father watching the light move across Cape Cod Bay, which have created a life-long habit of walking on the beaches and observing the varying light. The photographs consist mostly of elemental depictions of sky, water and light. They are a meditation on the contradiction that the sea evokes calm and poetic introspection, while remaining an overwhelming force of nature.

Exhibitions Solo exhibitions Centric 29: Barbara Bosworth, University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach, CA, 1987 Meeting Places: Photographs by Barbara Bosworth, Missoula Museum of Art, Missoula, MT, 1996 Photographs by Barbara Bosworth (ten-year retrospective), The Art Museum, Princeton University, March 14 - June 18, 2000 Human Nature: the Photographs of Barbara Bosworth, Phoenix Art Museum, April 19, 2008 - July 27, 2008 Earth and Sky: Photographs by Barbara Bosworth, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery, June 20, 2008 - November 20, 2008, donated by Haluk Soykan and Elisa Frederickson and supported by Bernie Stadiem Endowment Fund Flow, Datz Museum, October 11, 2014 - February 5, 2015 Barbara Bosworth: Quiet Wonder, Denver Art Museum, March 13, 2015 - September 20, 2015 Heaven, Wind, Stars and Poems: Photographs by Barbara Bosworth, Datz Museum, South Korea, 2017 Barbara Bosworth: Sun Light Moon Shadow, Cleveland Museum of Art, February 25, 2024 - June 30, 2024 Barbara Bosworth: The Meadow, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, May 25 - December 1, 2024

Group exhibitions The Altered Landscape, organized by the Reno Museum of Art, traveling exhibition; Bosworth is one of the artists included in the accompanying book. Crossing the Frontier, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, traveling exhibition America's Uncommon Places: Sites from the National Register of Historic Places: Seventeen photographers were selected for an exhibition sponsored by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The Singing and the Silence: Birds in Contemporary Art, October 31, 2014 – February 22, 2015, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC: Show included twelve "major contemporary American artists"

Awards

1985: Ruttenberg Fellowship, Friends of Photography, San Francisco, CA 1986: Artist-in-Residence, Bernheim Forest in Kentucky 1992: Artist-in-Residence, Appalachian Environmental Arts Center in North Carolina 1993: New England Foundation for the Arts 1995: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Fellowship 1998/1999: Buhl Foundation, New York, NY, Grant 2002: MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH, Fellowship 2008: Laurel School, Cleveland, OH, Scholar-in-Residence 2008: Marsh Billings Rockefeller National Historical Park, Woodstock, VT, Fellowship 2010: Sudbury, Assabet, and Concord Wild and Scenic River Stewardship Council, Wild and Scenic River Grant 2012: Kittredge Fund, Grant 2016: Shortlisted for Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation, Photo Book of the Year 2024: The Cleveland Art Prize, Life Time Achievement

Publications

Bosworth, Barbara; Kelley, Margot Anne; Lukitsh, Joanne; Gingerich, Owen (2018). The Heavens. Santa Fe, NM: Radius.

Collections Bosworth's work is held in the following permanent collection: Museum of Modern Art, New York: 1 print (as of 1 April 2022)