Take Me to the River: Photographs of Atlantic Rivers

"Take Me to the River" explores four post-industrial rivers that flow into the Atlantic Ocean—the Androscoggin (Maine/New Hampshire), Schuylkill (Pennsylvania), James (Virginia), and Savannah (Georgia/South Carolina)—as they emerge from two centuries of use and neglect. With vastly improved water quality in each river since enactment of the 1972 Clean Water Act, public affection has gradually increased as memories of foul smells and fetid water fade. Today, these rivers still carry the legacies of longstanding pollution in their currents and sediments, yet they have become waterways, renewed and rediscovered, that our grandparents never could have envisioned.

"Take Me to the River" comprises four portfolios of ambrotypes of these rivers, from source to sea. Three extensive essays offer different perspectives on ways of seeing and thinking about these places: one by the photographer on the collodion process; a historical view by Alison Nordström, the former Senior Curator of Photography at the George Eastman House, on the importance of Kolster’s work; and an environmental history of Atlantic rivers by the noted historian Matthew Klingle.

Kolster’s dramatic yet understated photographs were made in a portable darkroom set up along the banks of the rivers with the wet-plate photographic process, a nineteenth-century method famously used to document the battlefields of the Civil War and the great vistas of the far American West. The chemical slurries that develop and fix the image on the glass plate mimic the movements of a river’s current, and the idiosyncratic qualities of the ambrotypes reference the historical coincidence of the dawn of photography and the industrialization of Europe and America.

With consensus building about our changing climate and the extent humans are responsible, these four Atlantic rivers challenge us to set aside our usual blinders of seeing the landscape as either pure or despoiled. As the boundaries between the human and the natural are increasingly entangled, these rivers suggest how we might embrace, even cherish, places once degraded and ignored.

Michael Kolster is a 2013 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Photography. His work has been exhibited widely and is included in the permanent collections of numerous museums in the U.S. and Europe, including the American University of Paris, Brown University, Center for Creative Photography, George Eastman House of Film and Photography, High Museum of Art, Huntington Library, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Princeton University Art Museum, Smith College Museum of Art, and Williams College Museum of Art. His previous books, all published with George F. Thompson Publishing, are Paris Park Photographs (2022), L.A. River (2019), and Take Me to the River: Photographs of Atlantic Rivers (2016). He is currently Professor of Art at Bowdoin College, where he has taught since 2000.

Alison Nordström is an independent scholar, writer, and curator based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1991 to 2002, she was Founding Director and Senior Curator of the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach Florida, and, from 2004 to 2013, was Senior Curator of Photographs at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. She is currently Curator for International Programs at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Artistic Director of the Lodz (Poland) Fotofestiwal, and a Scholar-in-Residence in the Graduate Department of Photography at Lesley University. She has curated more than 100 exhibitions of photography, including major surveys of landscape, portraiture, travel photographs, and journalism.

Matthew Klingle is an associate professor of history and environmental studies at Bowdoin College and the author of Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (Yale University Press, 2007), which received the biennial 2009 Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Klingle has received awards, fellowships, and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, American Society for Environmental History, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, Organization of American Historians, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Urban History Association, and Western History Association.