“Barbara Bosworth: The Meadow” consists of only a book and 17 photographs. That might be just as well. The photographs are so beautiful in their understated way that any more than that might seem overwhelming.
The show runs through Dec. 1 at the Museum of Fine Arts. The museum’s Karen Haas curated.
Bosworth, who taught for many years at MassArt, is a landscape photographer of lyrical yet exacting sensibility. Part of that exactitude is owing to her use of a large-format camera, which allows for surpassingly fine detail.
In 1996, Bosworth began going to a 20-acre conservation site in Carlisle. She’d visit there at different times during the day and during all four seasons. Bosworth did this for some 15 years. In collaboration with a friend, the poet Margot Anne Kelley, Bosworth published “The Meadow” (2015). That’s the book mentioned above. The exhibition features several wall texts by Kelley.
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Most of the photographs are 32 inches by 40 inches, or vice versa. One of them, rolled out scroll-like, is roughly 13 feet by 9 inches. Its anomalous shape is one of the more charming things in a show of great charm. There are also four photographs that seem almost miniatures by comparison, either 8 inches by 10 inches or vice versa.
The big ones attract the eye, as one would expect. They then hold it, as one might not. It’s a tribute to Bosworth’s delicacy and innate sense of modesty that a larger scale should feel so right. Photographically, bigness can be vulgar, even poster-ish. Not here. These are images that benefit from being big. Size lets them breathe. The four small ones, in fact, feel slightly confined.
Regardless of size, each of the images looks distinctly itself and specific, yet also of a piece. One might conceive of “The Meadow” as a kind of mosaic, with each photograph contributing to the tessellation.
It’s also of a peace, but that can be deceptive. Though there’s a sense of quietude to these images, they’re by no means silent. Anyone who’s been in a meadow knows they’re rarely without the sound of wind, insect life, flowing water. They’re alive, and that liveliness is no less about sound than sight.
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That balance between specificity and wholeness has counterpart balances: between plenitude and openness, visual straightforwardness and a larger sense of mystery, the natural world and human presence. Signs of the latter include a bird house, a picnic table and bench, a wooden fence and gate, the angle of which, opened, elegantly aligns with a leafless tree.
Alignment can take many forms. In “Fireflies along the lane,” there’s a sense of depth that’s as startling as the stutterings of light that dot the image. “View of the meadow, frosty dawn” offers a juxtaposition of frost and mist that’s like a mini-primer on winter in New England. The luminousness of “Fall light in the meadow” manages to be both ravishing and subdued (speaking of balance). In “Twilight with daffodils,” Bosworth shows why “magic hour” gets called that.
The text accompanying that photograph is from Kelley: “seeing without needing to name, sensing without needing to act, for a few moments at least, we inhabited a truth that was, if nothing else, closer to the ground.”
Kelley means closer to the ground in both senses of the term. Alex Joseph Hansen’s photographs at Panopticon Gallery are far above the ground, literally, and what magnificent terrain that Alaskan ground is.
“Glacier: Bradford Washburn’s Mountain Photography Meets Contemporary Counterparts — Photographs by Alex Joseph Hansen” (if there’s an unwieldier exhibition title this year, you don’t want to know it) runs through July 30.
There are three photographs by Washburn (1910-2007), the pioneering mountain photographer and longtime head of the Museum of Science, and 20 by Hansen. All but one of the Hansens are 20 inches by 30 inches, or vice versa. The one exception is a real monster, 40 inches by 80 inches. There’s nothing small scale about the sublime, and these mountainscapes are nothing if not sublime.
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The Hansen photographs are unmatted, with thick black frames. This accentuates the whiteness of the snow in some photos and chimes with its dark absence in others. The absence is doubly dark, with several images showing the effects of climate change. Ponder the third word in the title “Trident Glacier Remains, Eastern Alaska Range.”
In only a quarter of the photographs is the horizon visible. It’s a self-contained world Hansen presents. Trees, rocks, clouds, shadows: All make appearances, but what dominates is upthrust stone, the ice and snow that lay upon it, and the rivers and ocean into which that ice and snow are drawn. The quite-glorious black-and-white tonalities Hansen achieves make that dominance all the more striking in appearance.
In an artist’s statement, he writes that “What matters is that I’m there and present.” The obvious corollary to that is a sense of such a presence getting conveyed to anyone looking at his images. Vastly different as they are in look and style, technique and subject, that sense applies to “Glacier” and “The Meadow” both.
BARBARA BOSWORTH: THE MEADOW
At Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., through Dec. 1. 617-267-9300, www.mfa.org
GLACIER: BRADFORD WASHBURN’S MOUNTAIN PHOTOGRAPHY MEETS CONTEMPORARY COUNTERPART – Photographs by Alex Joseph Hansen
At Panopticon Gallery, 502c Commonwealth Ave., through July 30. 781-740-1300, www.panopticongallery.com
Mark Feeney can be reached at [email protected].