Take Me To the River

By Michael KolsterProfessor of Art In Take Me to the River, Michael Kolster explores four American rivers that flow into the Atlantic Ocean—the Androscoggin, Schuylkill, James, and Savannah—as they emerge from two centuries of industrial use and neglect. Even as these well-known rivers still carry the legacies of longstanding pollution in their currents and sediments, thanks to the Clean Water Act of 1972, they have become renewed and rediscovered waterways that our grandparents never could have envisioned. Kolster's new book is a masterful presentation of dramatic yet understated photographs of these rivers, from their source to the sea. In the spirit of nineteenth-century photographers such as Louis Daguerre, Henry Fox Talbot, and Timothy O'Sullivan, they were made using the wet-plate photographic process, in a portable darkroom Kolster set up along the banks and overlooks of these rivers. The chemical slurries that develop and fix the image on the glass plate actually mimic the move