Barbara Bosworth: The Heavens

Made over the past several years with an 8 × 10 camera, BARBARA BOSWORTH’s photographs of stars are hour-long exposures with the camera mounted on a clock drive. Her 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 seventeenth-century publications in which he first observed the skies through a telescope.