The Hudson River School was America’s first art movement. Founded in the 1830s American painters depicted the landscape of the Hudson Valley and the Catskill Mountains as a vast romantic wilderness. Coming at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the work of these artists inspired a conservation movement that has preserved this landscape for generations. As we approach the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Hudson River School, it seems a perfect moment to celebrate the legacy of this work. Remarkably, the preservation efforts inspired by these early paintings have allowed this wilderness to slowly return to the state in which these visionary painters viewed it.

For the past three years, I’ve trained my home made pinhole cameras on this legendary landscape. My intention is to celebrate the region and the work of these early painters by reintroducing this landscape to the public using these age-old cameras. The pinhole camera is particularly suited for this endeavor. Known to painters since the Renaissance, pinhole projections – or the Camera Obscura, as it was known – would have been a device familiar to the painters of the Hudson River School. The long time exposures required with the pinhole necessitates the camera lingering in the landscape, slowly taking-in the light. In that time, the wind blows, waters rush by, the earth turns. These elements are captured as blurred “ghosted” forms and reintroduce feeling to the photograph by likening them to the abstract brush strokes of a painter.

The woodland goddess is also a source of inspiration in this landscape work. This anonymous rendering of the sylvan deity can be found in the earliest depictions of western art as Artemis or Diana and would have been also quite familiar to the Hudson River School painters. Aside from giving the viewer a sense of scale, like the tableaus vivant found in many Hudson River School paintings, the apparition in these photographs also represents the transcendent feeling or presence we sometimes experience when we view these landscapes.

Exploring the Catskills over the last few years with these cameras has inspired me. Chasing dramatic weather events and the ever-shifting light of these majestic mountains harkens back to the first photographers that emerged in the mid 19th century. I’m seeking to emulate the work and legacy of the Hudson River School with a modern pictorialist’s view.