A river realm
“Spider web, Rail Trail between Northampton and Hadley, Mass.’’ {on the Connecticut River} (archival digital print), by Mary Lang , in her show “Here, nowhere else,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, Sept. 4-29.
She says of her show:
“Each one of these photographs could be a doorway into a separate realm. They are single perceptions, clear and vivid, like waking from a dream, finding yourself Here, nowhere else. Like the turning of a kaleidoscope, for a moment time stops, everything falls into place and I am part of the invisible pattern that holds the world together. Though standing on the earth, it still feels groundless. For so many years I photographed water as a way of exploring groundlessness. It turns out that photographing earth is groundless as well.
“The world is inundated with photographs; 100 million and counting are uploaded to Instagram every day, visual records of a place or a time, a vacation or a hike. These photographs are those as well, but what makes this one, and not that one, rise above so many others, to hang on the wall in a frame, is because captured within the photograph is a sense of presence, of this moment, here, nowhere else, an absorption into vastness that some would call magic.’’
Looking north up the Connecticut River from the French King Bridge, at the Erving-Gill town line in western Massachusetts. Too many New Englanders don’t realize that the Connecticut is one of the world’s most beautiful rivers.
“If the river is as varied and beautiful as the Connecticut, you can merely look at it – in the long light of a sultry summer evening, under an angry winter sky, in the high color of autumn or the pastel shades of spring – and derive that sense of peace and uplift of the spirit that most men find in living water.’’
-- Roger Tory Peterson (1908-1996, artist and naturalist), in The Connecticut River, by Evan Hill (1972)