Barbara Bosworth- Artist Lecture

        Barbara Bosworth grew up looking at the woods.  She was fascinated with the view of the woods outside the window and spent time walking the woods with her parents.  Both her parents loved the outdoors as well, her mother liked to learn the names of the plants while her father simply liked to gaze at the landscape. She took a beautiful picture of her parents spending time outside by a stream.  She captured there carefree attitudes without it appearing posed while I know that the 8 by 10 camera used would take longer than an average camera to capture the scene.  This is what made her want the photograph nature, watching the way her parents interacted with nature as she grew up.

        Later she shot a series of photographs showing award winning trees that were at the time considered the largest of their kind. It captures the fleeting time when these were the largest trees.  Many of these trees are no longer the largest and some may no longer be there.  This took time and planning to find the trees and travel to each one.  Sometimes she was only able to photograph one tree a day. 

When her father died she decided to take the opportunity to photograph her family while she could.  For a time she focused more completely on photographing family members and the time that she spent with them.  She took her camera with her when she went places with family members so she could record the moments, even just spending time with them in the backyard.  For a time she felt that if she took pictures of them then they could never be completely taken away from her.  Looking back she sees that this was an illogical response to losing her father.  The pictures were still able to capture those moments with her family so she can look back at them now. One picture included in her presentation was of her niece and nephew at a young age at her parents’ house. 

        After a time she decided that she now wanted to photograph birds.  This was a particularly interesting subject to her because her mother was seeing birds that were not there at the time.  However getting pictures of birds was a challenge with her eight by ten camera which tended to take slow pictures. This was not a problem with the trees she shot before that did not move but it made pictures of moving subjects much harder. She discovered a way around this by photographing birds as they were handled by the people who tag them.  First she started with photographs of the birds being held by the taggers. These focused on the birds and showed how beautiful they were. Later she started to take photographs of the moment when they were being released.  These were less focused on getting a clear picture of the bird and more on the gesture of releasing them made by the handlers. This is a time consuming project as the birds were only tagged at a certain time of year.  It has taken her many years to get the photographs that she has but she is not done with this project yet.  All the photographs in Barbara Bosworth’s collection took time to capture, she slowly found her subjects even at remote locations, and captured a moment that will eventually be gone.

A photograph by Barbara Bosworth