Nature in Black and White:

Barbara Bosworth has been photographing nature for nearly 20 years. Her work, a selection of which is on display at the University's Art Museum through June 18, showcases landscapes across North America. The exhibit includes photographs from a number of Bosworth's series, including the recent "Bitterroot River" series.

"The Bitterroot River" series, which was acquired by the Art Museum specifically for this exhibition, is the result of careful planning between Bosworth and Toby Jurovics, the Associate Curator of Photography at the Art Museum. The process of arranging photographs for "The Bitterroot River" took nearly six months, as the 24 photographs in the series were chosen from more than 100 negatives, and many are being exhibited for the first time.

The way in which humans interact with nature is a constant theme in Bosworth's work. Several of the photos in the exhibit are from a series on hunters that Bosworth began in 1991. She is careful to point out in interviews that she photographs only subsistence hunters, hunting to feed their families, rather than trophy hunters. Bosworth picked hunters as a subject for the series after viewing their particular knowledge of the land on which they hunted and the way they were forced to confront death in their daily activities.

Bosworth received a Guggenheim fellowship to continue her series on hunters, but shortly before she resumed work on the series, her fiance — a hunter himself — committed suicide, and she found herself unable to continue the project. Rather than continue to photograph hunters, she spent a lot of time at a river near her home, and photographing it became a form of comfort.

It is from this experience that "The Bitterroot River Series" began. From Bosworth's anguish and grief, 24 beautiful and haunting photographs emerge. The photographs contain a certain fragility, a vulnerability and, at the same time, a delicate peace.

Many of the other photos in the exhibit are in a panoramic style but are actually three separate consecutive images printed onto one page. Bosworth uses a wide-angle lens for these photographs, meaning that each image contains a much wider frame of reference than one would expect. Bosworth does not change the position of her tripod while shooting the panoramas but merely rotates it, guiding it only by years of practice.

Jurovics, in his lecture on the exhibit, stressed the difficulty of this technique because Bosworth uses a cumbersome 8 in. by 10 in. large format camera that takes several moments to set up each shot. The advantage of using such a large camera is that it uses an 8 in. by 10 in. negative for each image, creating much sharper photographs than standard 35 mm film.

Bosworth's panoramic photographs are distinctive because she keeps the black division created by the edge of the negative in the final photograph, forming two vertical black lines that mark the separate photographs. Despite this physical mark of separation, the photographs merge seamlessly into one panoramic view.

Several other photographs on display are from yet another one of Bosworth's series, this one on National Champion trees. The display lists the locations of about 800 of the largest trees of each species in North America. In Bosworth's photographs, though, the trees do not seem oversized. They look perfectly ordinary and are usually not completely in the frame. In addition, the focus of the photograph is often placed somewhere else.

These photographs convey the message that in the natural world, it is not important which tree is biggest, and that the need to classify and label everything is imposed on the wild by people. Jurovics is careful to point out that in all of her photographs, Bosworth does not press any environmentalist agenda too far, because of the fear that politics would overpower her images. She aims to allow the viewers of her photographs to feel like they are a part of these places, rather than being confronted with a political agenda expressed in an artistic manner. And she succeeds admirably in this goal.