Trees capture our imagination because they are rooted solidly in the earth but point ethereally toward the sky. They occupy a dimension that has as much to do with time and patience as with place and landscape. They are vertical beings to whom we attribute qualities both divine and human. Since 1991, photographer Barbara Bosworth has been on a quest to photograph America's "champion" trees -- trees that are the biggest of their species, as recorded in the National Register of Big Trees, a list established and maintained by the nonprofit conservation organization American Forests. She has traveled down highways and up back roads, walked through forests and across clear-cut land, sometimes led by local tree enthusiasts, sometimes alone, to photograph trees that are remarkable not only for their size but for their endurance.Bosworth finds champion trees in backyards, fields, and forests, near roadways, power lines, and sidewalks. Her photographs document the trees' magnificence but also show how they are markers of a changing landscape. The yellow poplar, for example, stands on the fringes of a suburban housing development, in the center of a park for the enjoyment and relaxation of residents. The western red cedar stands alone in the middle of a clear-cut, saved from logging only because it is recorded in the Register as the biggest of its kind. The trees and their surroundings tell us about our relationship with nature and the land.Bosworth captures the ineffable grace and dignity of trees with clarity and directness: the green ash that shades a midwestern crossroads, the common pear that blooms in a Washington field, and the Florida strangler fig with its mass of entwining aerial roots. Her photographs, panoramic views taken with an 8 x 10 camera, show the immensity of the largest species and the hidden triumphs of the smallest. Some trees are dethroned each year because of sickness or destruction, but more often simpy because a new and bigger specimen is discovered; only three trees from the original Register in 1940 are still living today. Bosworth's 70 photographs of champion trees are not only a collection of tree portraits but the story of an American adventure as well.A copublication with the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson.

Trees: National Champions Photographs

Arts & Photography

Stilgoe, John R.

Nickel, Douglas R.

Bosworth, Barbara

Photography & Video

Mit Pr

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and other beloved children's books. But before achieving fame as an author, Dodgson was a prolific and sophisticated photographer, acutely engaged in the art world of Victorian England. This beautifully illustrated book is the first to examine Dodgson's photographs not as the sideline of a celebrated writer, but as the creations of a serious photographic artist - and to demonstrate their importance to the history of photography. Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll is published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and traveling to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the International Center for Photography in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Yale University Press

In 1856, the English photographer Francis Frith set out on the first of three tours of Egypt and the Holy Lands. Traveling up the Nile and then on to the Sinai, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, Frith systematically crafted exquisite pictures of ruins, landscapes, and legendary sites. He then published his views in England and America in a variety of formats, becoming something of a celebrity in photographic circles. This book, the first to place Frith's Egyptian and Levantine images in cultural context, reveals the distinct meanings these ostensibly "topographic" pictures held for the photographer and his Victorian audience.
 A Quaker by birth and an entrepreneur by nature, Frith brought to his photographic projects a sense of mission: to revive and confirm the stories of the Bible, while offering the region to armchair travelers as a seamless Oriental milieu of Romantic reverie. Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestine narrates the political, intellectual, and social concerns that make Frith representative of England's encounter with the East in the nineteenth century. Historian of photography Douglas R. Nickel brings a sophisticated interdisciplinary approach to bear on the subject in order to expose the complexity of Frith's image-making, setting the photographs against a Victorian backdrop of religious debate, imperialist thought, Romantic philosophy, and Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics.

Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestine: A Victorian Photographer Abroad

History & Criticism

Princeton University Press

Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888 to the Present

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The SF MoMA was one of the first museums in the world to present photography as a fine art. More importantly, however, the museum recognized photography as one of the most vital and expressive art forms of the modern period. 
This superb collection of photographs features works from over 70 photographers including: Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, Eugene Atget, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand.

Picturing Modernity: Highlights from the Photography Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

San Francisco Museum

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Books by Nickel, Douglas R.