Barbara Bosworth: The Sea

Since moving to New England in 1984, Barbara Bosworth has been photographing the sea and its awe-inspiring ability to transform sky, water, and light. The sea evokes calm introspection, romance, and poetry, while remaining a deeply unknowable and overpowering natural force, a contradiction that has drawn people to the shoreline for millennia. Before she discovered photography, and for as long as she can remember, Bosworth has been looking at the sea. Many hours were spent with her father watching the light move across Cape Cod Bay. Later in life, she walked those same beaches with the wonder that had been passed down by her father, as well as generations of writers, poets, and artists. This book of photographs of the sea, made with an 8x10 camera, follows in the tradition of The Meadow and The Heavens, serving as the third and final volume in the series, keeping the same size and design elements as the previous two publications.

Barbara Bosworth is a photographer whose large-format images explore both overt and subtle relationships between humans and the rest of the natural world. Whether chronicling the efforts of hunters or bird banders or evoking the seasonal changes that transform mountains and meadows, Bosworth’s caring attention to the world around her results in images that similarly inspire viewers to look closely. 

Bosworth grew up in Novelty, Ohio. She currently lives in Massachusetts, where she is professor emeritus of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Her single images display a generous attention to small facts, while her large-scale triptychs reveal a panoramic awareness, one that lets viewers glimpse relationships between frames across a wide field. While all of Bosworth’s projects remind viewers not only that we shape the rest of nature but that it also shapes us.

Bosworth’s work has been widely exhibited, notably in retrospectives at the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona. Her previous publications include, The Heavens (Radius Books, 2018), The Meadow (Radius Books, 2015), Natural Histories (Radius Books, 2013), From Where the Sun Now Stands (Dust Collective, 2019), Behold (Datz Press, 2014),  Trees: National Champions (MIT Press; Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 2005).