Janet L. Pritchard’s photographic study of the Connecticut River watershed started with a plate of homemade potato salad, garden greens, and a piece of shad.

When she conceived the idea for the project in 2017, her first stop was to the Essex Rotary Club Shad Bake. The way they cook the fish – using galvanized nails to pin strips of pork fat over seasoned fish fillets then tipping the oak planks vertically over a fire to allow the oils to run out – particularly interested her, she says.

She also was interested in meeting the people who filleted the thousands of tiny bones from the fish, those who came to the bake, even those who stayed away. What were their stories? How did they relate to that section of the river’s 410-mile span? What do they think about the river? What’s the view out their windows? How does the river affect their daily lives?

A piece of fish – much different tasting than the bluefish she grew up catching and turning her nose up at during summers on Long Island Sound – started the journey that she expects will be ongoing at least a few more years as part of “Abiding River: Connecticut River Views & Stories.”

With several dozen photographs from the project on display at the Alexey von Schlippe Gallery of Art at UConn Avery Point until April 28, Pritchard, a photography professor in UConn’s Department of Art and Art History, says she expects “Abiding River” to be as large as “More than Scenery: Yellowstone, An American Love Story,” a 15-year endeavor that culminated in a 240-page book published in late 2022.

The river, with 148 tributaries and 7.2 million acres, merits just as much attention.

A single entity; not a composition of pieces

“Stage One of these projects is to start to figure out what’s there, what’s interesting, what’s happening, what do I need to know about, what do I need to learn more about, and who do I need to talk to,” she says, quoting an 11th century Japanese gardening book that in part says, “begin by considering the lay of the land and water.”

By the end of the first half of her Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, Pritchard says she got to that place and around that time happened to share her book plans with friend Walter Woodward, UConn professor emeritus and retired state historian.

He implored her not to structure the book in terms of regional identities – that is, the Great North Woods, the Northeast Kingdom, the Upper Valley, and down to what Pritchard has dubbed “Second Home Country” near the mouth in Connecticut.

The river is a single entity, not a composition of pieces into a whole, he told her.

“I thought about that for a couple of years, and recently concluded the book is going to reflect the fact that the river – the watershed, the hydrological system – is a thing. One thing. But the way people live with the river is not. Each region is different and so are the people’s lives and experiences,” she says.

In images of the fish viewing room at the Robert E. Barrett Fishway at the Holyoke Dam in Massachusetts, harvested broadleaf tobacco in Massachusetts, used hypodermic needles tossed aside at the Cornish-Windsor covered bridge in New Hampshire, the inside of an electrical substation in Vermont, even the Trinity College women’s rowing team at practice in East Hartford, she conveys the river’s reach into daily life.

“Historically, it’s a landscape of many different people,” she says, “beginning with the Indigenous people who have been here almost since the glaciers receded. It’s a landscape from which people have been pushed out. But it’s also a landscape of tremendous history in the formation of our nation. It’s a landscape of tremendous history in terms of technology. It’s a landscape of tourism and what that does to a region.”

And all along there are so many bridges.

Photographs of the French King Bridge in Erving, Massachusetts, and the Founder’s Bridge in Hartford, which she’s privately titled “Cathedral of the Highways,” are part of the Avery Point exhibition.

She says these bridges and others play a significant role in the lives of those who live near and on the river, with people crossing the waterway for work, family, business, and recreation – even if that means, in Vermont and New Hampshire, leaving one state for the other.

That’s one of the reasons she’s also included in the exhibition a photograph of the Rocky Hill-Glastonbury ferry in Connecticut, one of two ferries on the river that bills itself the oldest continuously operating ferry in the U.S.

‘Human influence all along the river’

“I feel strongly about protecting the environment. We need the environment to stay healthy and protect us,” she says.

But along the river, a competition of interests, between the needs of people and the needs of the wild, is noticeable.

“In this project I’ve been learning about boreal forests in the Great North Woods of New Hampshire, which seem tremendously pristine, but, in fact, there’s ample evidence of acid raid,” she says. “You can find human influence all along the river.”

Most of the Google alerts Pritchard gets on the Connecticut River, she says, are for news stories about bodies and cars being dragged out, flooding the result of excess rainfall and snowpack, and sewage spills: “The river is a notable example of what’s happening in our time in terms of lack of vigilance as our government collapses.”

Here in Connecticut, she says, the river is a socioeconomic dividing line, breaking the state in half. Fairfield and Litchfield counties in the west, for instance, have residents with far more wealth than those living in the east at the Rhode Island border.

A photograph of a home under construction in the Hamburg Cove area that’s eight miles north of the Sound is evidence of that, she says. It’s a sight she happened upon in 2018 as she was traveling through “Second Home Country.”

The opportunity was there, so she took the picture. But oftentimes, Pritchard says, photos are more deliberate and planned – like when she returned to the same blooming wisteria vine three consecutive years to catch it at its perfect peak.

“When I was younger – and I still do this but I’m better than I used to be – and I would go out to make photographs, I would have a list of things to shoot and cross them off the list,” she says. “Those photographs were OK. But when my list was done and I could open my awareness, that’s where the good photographs were, when I found something I didn’t expect.”

Much the same as she didn’t expect to like the taste of shad – although “The Founding Fish” by John McPhee about shad helped her understand its significance to the river and prompted her initial interest – Pritchard says she learned, very early on when still ruminating on the idea for the project, that even as a New Jersey girl her family roots extended into the Connecticut River valley.

Her grandfather grew up in Wethersfield and genealogical research shows an early family member in Connecticut in 1646.

“It’s no wonder my wife and I chose to raise our three sons in the Quiet Corner,” she says.

Over the years since, Pritchard says she’s learned countless more about the river – like, there are more than a dozen dams across the main stem and they’re all for hydrological electricity development, operated by multinational corporations, save the Holyoke Dam that’s run by a co-op.

She also learned that until recently, Massachusetts property owners who had on their land one of the thousands of smaller dams on the river weren’t liable for damage downstream if their dam broke. That law recently was changed and many of the dams were removed, which has inadvertently resulted in a healthier ecosystem.

On one trek out to take pictures, Pritchard says she went seeking a bald eagle nest – even though she says ospreys and their return to the area tell a better ecological story – and found it in the tree line adjacent to a homeowner’s beautifully manicured lawn.

“You don’t even know the eagle is in the picture because it’s so small,” she explains. “But the important part of the story is that the husband grew up in that town, went away for school and work, and when he and his wife retired and moved back, he remembered the house from when he was young.”

She continues, “Back then, there were no windows on one side of the home because the river was so polluted. Today, there are windows, and the river is gorgeous.”

More than two dozen photographs from “Abiding River: Connecticut River Views & Stories” are on display as part of an exhibition by the same name at the Alexey von Schlippe Gallery of Art at UConn Avery Point until April 28.

None of the images used in this article are real photographs. They are instead creations generated by Adobe‘s new Model 3 generative AI on Firefly. 

Adobe has been using some form of AI for years, whether it is the spot removal tool or the magic wand, however, the new generative capabilities of AI have kicked things up a notch, enabling the generation of photorealistic images from a single prompt. Adobe is not the only, or by no means the first software program, to offer this kind of image generation but the announcement at Adobe Max that Firefly will be introduced to Photoshop, places this generative tool in the hands of many more people – and I am not sure what this means for the industry or the wider implications of content consumption in general. 

• See our guides for the best AI image generators

In a world where it is already difficult to believe everything you see or hear on social media, the addition of generating seemingly real images can be a dangerous one and one that I think more people should be aware of. As you can see from these images the ability to resemble real objects and people is coming out the other side of the uncanny valley and is wholly believable, and if you are quickly scrolling through social media, even more so. 

I am not for one minute calling for a ban on this kind of technology, as it is a fantastic creative tool that is producing some amazing art, and even acting as an idea generator. Adobe has made retouching, editing, and video editing much easier and has simplified many aspects of post-production via AI. I am personally excited by where AI might take us, especially in terms of video generation and video post-processing. 

I am instead expressing concern for those unaware of the capabilities of this technology, and urge more scrutiny in questioning image validity and sources more rigorously. This is even more of a concern with large political elections on the horizon. 

Thankfully this is also a concern for official organizations that have created bills and policies that deter false news and challenge the authenticity of images, but at present, this is easy to bypass. 

Adobe is an example of a company doing its part by issuing strict guidelines that stop the generation of images that could be used for harm or social manipulation, however, some aren’t as rigid.

I think that is also worth noting that some of these images would not look out of place among a shortlist of photography competitions. Suppose these images can be created by typing a sentence into a search bar. In that case, you may start to see these photographs feature more prominently on social media or competitions themselves, with no statement of AI involvement. 

It is also worth pointing out that the current iteration of this sort of image and video generation is the worst it will ever be, and will only become more realistic and believable!

An arms fair may contain all the trappings of war, but it is nothing like a battlefield. It is “an oversized playground for adults with wine, finger foods and shiny weapons,” said photographer Nikita Teryoshin in a press release about his new book, “Nothing Personal: The Back Office of War.”

Bodies, he continues, are mannequins or pixels on a screen. Machine guns and bazookas are plugged into flatscreens to shoot targets in a computer game-like simulation, and mock battles are staged in artificial environments for high-ranking guests, heads of states, ministers, generals and arms dealers.

“I’d say it blew my mind,” Teryoshin told CNN in a video call, recalling his first time attending an arms trade fair, where military, security and policing equipment is showcased and sold.

The Russian photographer said he was used to seeing images of war in the media — towns destroyed, the bloodied faces of people caught in conflict — but was taken aback by the disconnect between those scenes and the business dealings behind them.

“Most of the time, I’d see people… drinking beer, wine and, like, a vodka next to the machine guns and really (having) a hardcore drinking party,” said the 37-year-old, who has spent close to a decade documenting what goes on behind the scenes of the military-industrial complex.

Teryoshin has seen weapons being sold and tested at expos across the world, in Poland, Belarus, France, Germany, South Korea, China, the UAE, Peru, Russia, Vietnam, USA and South Africa. His book, released earlier this year, paints a picture of an absurd enterprise run by seemingly careless merchants of destruction.

One photo shows a half-consumed mug of coffee left near the edge of a table, barely a foot away from dummy Python, Derby and Spike ER missiles on sale for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. Another captures a man in a shiny pin-stripe gray suit crawling under an armored vehicle between two large tires that look like they could crush him at any moment.

“I think it tells (us) things about this banality of, you can say, the evil… and how we are selling weapons as (if they were) vacuum cleaners,” said Teroyshin. “On the one hand, they tried to make it look perfect with this (gallery-like space) for the exhibition, and on the other hand, when you look… (and) see all the details… it’s kind of dirty.”

Teryoshin captured these scenes with a distinct flair — using a flash to create high-contrast, saturated images, some shot from awkward angles to leave viewers feeling unsettled.

The photographer also has a knack for picking out the kitsch and propaganda on display. There’s the close up of a blue-eyed, red-lipped mannequin decked out in a military uniform and wearing glittery eyeshadow; a travel poster-esque image of fighter jets and cotton candy clouds that one might expect to read “Wish you were here” scrawled in cursive; or the photo of a cardboard cutout solider, in full military gear, holding a rifle with a cartoonish rendering of a mushroom cloud in the background. The more authoritarian the host country is, the kitschier things get, said Teroyshin.

In Russia, Teryoshin visited an arms fair at Patriot Park, a huge theme park often described as a “military Disneyland” where visitors are encouraged to climb on tanks, participate in urban warfare scenarios and eat military rations at the park canteen. It was here the photographer saw the biggest display of firepower he has ever witnessed: a mock battlefield, complete with artificial terrain and very real rockets.

“It was the only (arms fair I’d been to) where they were shooting real rockets over 20 kilometers (12 miles) maybe,” said Teroyshin.

No blood, no bodies

The photographer said he thought the salespeople at arms fairs actively distanced themselves from the damage these weapons cause. “There is no connection to death and war. You never see blood or bodies,” said Teroyshin, adding that the only thing he saw showing the human impact was an amputee mannequin (called Majid), used to simulate catastrophic medical care scenarios.

Weapons companies also appeared to brand themselves as heroes, said Teroyshin, who documented slogans he saw on site. Kalashnikov Group, whose AK –47 rifles are among the cheapest on the market and are thought to have killed more people globally than any other firearm, used the slogan “70 years defending peace,” he said, while marketing materials by Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s biggest arms manufacturers read: “We are engineering a better tomorrow.”

In his book, Teroyshin has ironically arranged the slogans with his own images taken at the fairs. Manufacturing firm ITT Inc’s “Engineered for life” is paired to a close-up of a mannequin with a bullet hole in its head. Meanwhile, an Otis Defence slogan (“We believe every gun should always shoot like new. Whenever. Wherever. Forever.”) is paired with an image of three women in Islamic veils at an arms fair, one pretending to hold a rifle depicted in the poster in front of her.

Teroyshin began documenting all types of trade fairs — for pets, agriculture and funerals — because his photography school in Dortmund, Germany, was located next to an expo hall. In 2016, the photographer, who has lived in Germany for over 20 years, published “Sons and Guns,” a photo series about hunting fairs, before turning his attention to arms fairs.

He began taking pictures showing the faces of buyers and sellers, but later chose to keep them concealed. “I just was thinking, ‘it’s not about certain people, but it’s more about the system behind it,’ which is the problem,” said Teryoshin. “Because most of the people will tell you: ‘Yeah, we have to work here because we have to feed our family’.”

Anonymizing his subjects was also a metaphor for an industry that “is kind of shady” and “doesn’t want much publicity,” he added.

On one of the last pages of the book, Linda Åkerström the head of policy and advocacy at the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society has written an afterword for Teroyshin’s book detailing her experience at IDEX, the biggest arms fair in the Middle East, and the growth of the military-industrial complex.

In it she said that the world’s military expenditure hit a record breaking $2.2 trillion with spending in Central and Western Europe surpassing levels “at the end of the Cold War.” The US and Russia, she said, were responsible for “more than half of the world’s exports of major conventional arms from 2018-2022,” and that states that did the most importing included India, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Australia and China.

Åkerström said despite the Arms Trade Treaty coming into force in December 2014, many of the world’s top exporters and importers, including the US, Russia, India and Saudi Arabia are yet to ratify and that “the international arms trade remains less regulated than the trade in bananas.”

Teroyshin said he began his work, he believed weapons had no place in the world, but with the start of the Ukraine war, he said he’s changed his mind. “It is important that Ukraine is able to like to fight back and to protect democracy there against Putin’s regime.”

As one unnamed salesman from the Swedish at BAE Systems Bofors told Åkerström: “I would also like a world free from arms, but there is always a madman. If you can’t hit back, you’ll get beat up.”

“Nothing Personal: The Back Office of War,” published by Gost, is available now.