Oxbow Archives
Photographs by Joel Sternfeild.
Steidl, 2008. 176 pp.,
164 color illustrations, 10¼x13". HB
On a summer morning in 1833, Thomas Cole, a British-born, American landscape painter climbed to the top of Mount Holyoke in central Massachusetts and made a sketch of the Connecticut River where it bends and resembles an ox yoke. Three years later the sketch he made that morning became View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow).
Nearly two hundred years after Cole painted The Oxbow, the American photographic artist, Joel Sternfeld, walked into the mile square field depicted in the lower right quadrant of Cole’s painting. Sternfeld had first photographed this field in 1978 while traveling on American Prospects. By the time he returned in 2006, the Oxbow in the river was crossed by an interstate highway and the destructive effects of progress that Cole had feared were making themselves apparent globally as climate change.
Sternfeld spent the next year and a half walking that field, commuting to it on an almost daily basis from his home in southern Vermont. His archive is a record of classic New England seasonality.
£30
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