Barbara Bosworth: The Heavens

A decade worth of large-format long-exposure photographs of the moon, sun and skyA New York Times Book Review 2020 holiday gift guide pick A follow-up to her successful 2015 book The Meadow, this project focuses on Boston-based photographer Barbara Bosworth's (born 1953) images of the moon, sun and sky. Made over the past several years with an 8x10 camera, the star images are hour-long exposures with the camera mounted on a clock drive so that the stars are rendered as dots instead of streaks. The sun and moon images are made with a telescope attached to Bosworth's camera.Speaking of her inspiration for these series, Bosworth writes: Every clear night of the summer my father would go out for a walk to look at the night sky. Many nights I would join him. We knew the North Star, and the Big Bear, but the rest became our own. At times we stood still for an hour or more to watch for shooting stars. We had no agenda. It was all about amazement at a sky full of stars. With this sense of wonder, I began making photographs of the Heavens. In these days of the Hubble Telescope and its spectacular imagery from deep space, I wanted a reminder of the mystery of our own night sky.The book also includes facsimile editions of three artist's books that Bosworth has made as a nod to Galileo's 17th-century publications in which he first observed the skies through a telescope.