Re: Anyone seen any interesting work lately?

There is an exhibit of photographs by Henry P. Bosse at the Weisman
Art Museum at the University of Minnesota. Bosse was an German-born
engineer, surveyor and draftsman who worked for the for the Corp of
Engineers on the Upper Mississippi from the late 1870s through the
early 1900s. He produced a remarkably accurate set of maps covering
the area between Minneapolis and St. Louis that guided river pilots
until locks and dams were built in the 1930s. He also photographed
extensively along the entire upper river using an 11x14 view camera.
His images are mostly impeccably composed landscpapes recording towns,
bridges and the power of the river as it interacts with the newly
created civilization that used the watercourse as its main highway.
Many images of steamboats and work on the river are also part of his
photography. Nearly all of the images are contact-printed cyanotypes,
which makes sense for a working surveyor and draftsman travelling in a
riverboat. Most are printed as ovals, which perhaps makes them seem
quaint to us now, but must have presented a compositional challenge to
Bosse. His work was unknown until a volume owned by relatives and
then given to a neighbor surfaced about ten years ago. When
auctioned at Sotheby's, the high quality of the work immediately
placed Bosse as one of the great 19th century photographers. A second
volume of his work was found in the pilot house of a river dredge,
where it had been in a drawer since 1937. The

Around 1972, I played a bit part on the first environment impact study
of the upper river. My job was to use a planimeter to measure the
surface of the river on some old navigation maps and then again on the
latest ariel-photographed navigation charts. The idea what to find
differences between the free-flowing river and the series of pools
that it has become today. A true delight for me at the Bosse
exhibition was to discover that this remarkable engineer/photographer
produced the maps I worked with nearly thirty years ago.

Try this link; but be warned: The slideshow takes a painfully long
time to load over a dail-up line.
http://webcampus3.stthomas.edu/mjodonnell/bosse/exhibit.html

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kate Hudec" <hudec@rcn.com>
To: <pinhole-discussion@pinhole.com>
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2001 2:38 PM
Subject: [pinhole-discussion] Anyone seen any interesting work lately?

> Lots of tech talk on the digest lately, which is great, but I was
wondering if anyone
> had seen any photography - pinhole or otherwise - that got them
excited lately?
>
>
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Received on Fri Nov 30 16:45:23 2001