Today, Barbara Bosworth, professor, Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) in Boston, and one of the premiere landscape photographers in the U.S., still regularly starts her presentations with a slide of an image that captures the heavily forested property surrounding her childhood home.
“The roots of so much of what I do now go back to Novelty, Ohio, where I grew up,” she reveals. “I’ve taken a lot of night sky pictures, and it all started with those walks I did with my father at night in our backyard. It was about the wonder my father had about the natural world and how he passed that on to me. Now, it’s not just about that space in Novelty, but anywhere I travel it feels like it comes back to that.”
As the family documenter, her father also passed along his cameras for Barbara to learn on as he bought new ones. “I became fascinated with photography, but it really struck me when I was nine,” she remembers. “I used my hard-earned allowance to buy my very first camera that was mine, not a hand-me-down from my dad.”
Highly supportive of everything she pursued, her parents were concerned about the practicality of a career in photography. She thought about seeking a career in science or natural science. “ I could have easily been a geologist or an ornithologist, but photography allowed me to do all of that and became something I could pursue seriously in my life,” she says.
Barbara enrolled at Bowling Green State University, where she received her B.A. in Fine Arts in 1975. She then earned an M.F.A. in photography at Rochester Institute of Technology in 1983 before landing her position at MassArt.
When time allows, she’s still quite fond of going for a long walk with her 8X10 box camera on her shoulder. “I do own a small digital camera, and I love just going for a walk with that camera, so that has changed some things,” she says. “The 8X10 is still an important part of my work, but they’re slightly different experiences of looking at the world.”
Barbara says she has earmarked part of her prize to purchase the increasingly expensive film required for her 8X10 camera. “Like all of the money, it goes back into my work,” she explains. “I’m also thinking about investing in a new, slightly better digital camera.”
“As an artist, I admire her work immensely,” enthuses S. Billie Mandle, associate professor, Photography Department at MassArt, who studied with and considers Barbara a mentor. “There’s a specificity and a mystery to the way she photographs landscapes that I admire a great deal. There’s a presence that her photographs evoke that’s almost magical.”
Of her distinguished work that has been featured in exhibitions across the U.S., including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Barbara concludes: “I feel very lucky to make my life doing something that I love and that I was able to have an educational position to share that with my students who were curious about the world. I’m very fortunate in my life to still be making these pictures.”