Barbara Bosworth

Barbara Bosworth’s publications include The Meadow (Radius Books, 2015); Natural Histories (Radius Books, 2013); Trees: National Champions (M.I.T. Press, 2005); and Chasing the Light (Nightwood Press, 2002). In 2016, The Meadow was nominated for the Aperture-Paris Photo Book of the Year prize. Bosworth’s work has been exhibited in several one-person shows, including Quiet Wonder, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; the multi-venue exhibition To Be at the Farther Edge: Photographs Along the New England Trail, (Mead Art Museum, Mt. Holyoke College Art Museum, and New Britain American Art Museum among others); Natural Histories, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; and Earth and Sky, Smithsonian American Art Museum. A recipient of multiple fellowships and grants, Bosworth’s awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and a Kittredge Foundation Grant. Her work is represented in major collections including Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Princeton Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Bosworth lives in Massachusetts. She is professor of photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.

A follow-up to her successful 2015 book The Meadow, this project focuses on Boston-based photographer Barbara Bosworth’s (born 1953) images of the moon, sun and sky. Made over the past several years with an 8×10 camera, the star images are hour-long exposures with the camera mounted on a clock drive. The sun and moon images are made with a telescope attached to her camera. Speaking of her inspiration for these images, Bosworth writes: “Every clear night of the summer my father would go out for a walk to look at the night sky. Many nights I would join him. We knew the North Star, and the Big Bear, but the rest became our own. At times we stood still for an hour or more to watch for shooting stars. We had no agenda. It was all about amazement at a sky full of stars. With this sense of wonder, I began making photographs of the Heavens. In these days of the Hubble Telescope and its spectacular imagery from deep space, I wanted a reminder of the mystery of our own night sky.” The book also includes facsimile editions of three artist’s books that Bosworth has made as a nod to Galileo’s 17th-century publications in which he first observed the skies through a telescope.