Barbara Bosworth & Emily Sheffer
Barbara Bosworth: @barbarabosworthstudio, Website
Emily Sheffer: @emilysheffer, Website
Barbara Bosworth and Emily Sheffer have worked together for the past decade. In that time, they have collaborated on many projects, including several handmade photography books through the publishing imprint, Dust Collective. These titles include, From Where the Sun Now Stands (2020), Light of the Eclipse (2019), and Tide and Air (2019). These titles feature photography by Barbara Bosworth and book design and production by Emily Sheffer.
Barbara Bosworth grew up in Novelty, Ohio, and along the shores of Lake Erie. She currently lives in Massachusetts, where she is professor emeritus of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. 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 publications include The Heavens (Radius Books, 2018), The Meadow (Radius Books, 2015), Natural Histories (Radius Books, 2013), and Trees: National Champions (MIT Press; Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 2005).
Emily Sheffer is a fine art photographer and book artist. In 2017, she founded Dust Collective, a handmade photography book collective, and has since published over a dozen titles. She earned her BFA in Photography with Departmental Honors from The Massachusetts College of Art and Design in May of 2015. After graduation, Emily was listed as a 2015 LensCulture Top 50 Emerging Photographer. In 2019, Maine Media Workshops invited Emily to be their book-artist-in-residence. She currently works as a studio director in New England. Emily graduated in 2022 from The University of Hartford Photography MFA program, where she was awarded the Merit Scholarship.
Barbara Bosworth, Babs along Rattlesnake Creek, MT, 1996, Silver gelatin print, 10" x 24"
Artist Statement
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. 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. Bosworth’s projects remind viewers not only that we shape the rest of nature but that it also shapes us.
As the founder of Dust Collective, Emily publishes small edition, handmade photography books. She prints, assembles and binds each book by hand in her studio. Emily works in collaboration with each artist in order to feature their work in a unique book form. The bodies of work often highlight themes of time, weather, nature, space, and the history of art. The format and design of each book is used to emphasize the meaning of the work within.
At Tusen Takk
In residence, Barbara Bosworth and Emily Sheffer produced a handmade photography book of Bosworth’s project Diana’s Baths and Other Landscape Stories highlighting her images of waterfalls, a sunrise swim, or of an elk grazing from the warm waters of a hot spring, evoking the mythological ambiance of a woodland pool. Each multi-paneled image, made with an 8x10 film camera, abounds with detail, leaving the viewer feeling immersed in the surrounding landscape. Together, Barbara Bosworth and Emily Sheffer have carefully crafted this series of landscape images into a special edition, hand-bound artist book that speaks to the mystery and wonder of a small moment in the solitude of the woods.
Diana’s Baths, Edition of 30, 10”x14”, 7 multi-panel images, each with gate fold. Hand-bound with custom printed cover. Autumn 2022, Designed by Emily Sheffer and published by Dust Collective. This book was made with support from the Tusen Takk Foundation.
Public Program
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