When she was a little girl growing up in Northeast Ohio — if not before she had a camera, years before she would become serious about photography — Barbara Bosworth went on little nighttime walks with her dad and gazed up at the stars.
“The night skies in the ’50s were much darker than they are now because of all the light pollution,” says Bosworth, who spent those younger years in rural Geauga County, specifically Russell Township, commonly referred to by her and others as Novelty.
Now a resident of Stow, Massachusetts, Tanembaum is in town and, on this particular Tuesday afternoon, in the Cleveland Museum of Art because the renowned institution has just begun exhibiting a show of her photographs, “Barbara Bosworth: Sun Light Moon Shadow.” It runs through June 30 in the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Galleries.
Not bad for someone who didn’t become deeply interested in creating art through a lens until after college.
“I bought my very first camera with my own allowance money when I was like 9,” she says. “It was just for vacations, trips, friends.
“At some point, I decided I wanted to learn about photography, and someone took me into a dark room and showed me how to process film, and I was just hooked.”
Many of the shots on display in “Sun Light Moon Shadow” are quite large, shot on an 8-by-10-view camera that holds an 8-by-10-inch piece of film, according to materials provided by the museum.
“I’m not exactly sure when I figured out that was the camera for me, but I intuitively knew that was the camera from (very early on),” Bosworth says. “I’m not fast at anything. Slow. So that was the perfect camera for me. It’s a big box lens on end, film on the other, on a tripod. Slow.”
The show, states a museum news release, “invites viewers to explore their relationship with nature and natural phenomena.” Its timing is no coincidence, as Northeast Ohio’s much-publicized date with a solar eclipse — April 8 — is in the middle of its run.
“I’d been looking at Barbara’s work for a long time — very familiar with it and thinking about what the context would be to show it,” says Barbara Tannenbaum, CMA curator of photography, chair of prints, drawings, and photographs. “Of course, the eclipse was the perfect opportunity to do that.”
While the images in the show can be quite grand, they also tend to reflect a level of intimacy.
”I really wanted to address how Barbara takes these amazing celestial phenomena and points out that humans really imbue them with personal meaning and personal emotion,” Tannenbaum says. “The stars in the sky may be gorgeous, but they don’t know and they don’t care.
“But, in fact, that’s the way we look at nature. And so these aren’t astronomical shots, they’re not scientific shots, even though they show you the moon, the sun, the stars. They’re really about human emotion and our response to those celestial phenomena.”
Perhaps there are no better illustrations of that than the shots featuring Bosworth’s late father, Franz Bosworth, in some way, such as the 2002 piece “My Father’s Last Sunset,” which shows a colorful sky as day draws to an end.
He is directly featured in “Christmas Solar Eclipse in My Father’s Hands,” According to the placard accompanying the piece, Bosworth shot it on Dec. 25, 2000, while visiting her parents in Sanibel, Florida. She punched pinholes in a large cardboard sheet and held it between him and the sun, the eclipse projecting images of the sun onto his hands, which he is holding together in front of himself. She notes he is wearing a vest with brass buttons he donned only on Christmases.
“It’s personal to me,” she says of the shot, “but I think people can relate to it because many people have fathers who present the universe to them.”
As for the more spectacular shots, such as 2007’s “Moon Setting into Fog Bank over Cape Cod Bay, Morning of the Total Lunar Eclipse” and 2017’s “Light of the Lunar Eclipse,” Tannenbaum says they can be viewed as almost surreal.
“Even though these are photographs, in many ways, some of them become very abstract,” she says. “They become almost like abstract paintings — abstract expressionist paintings. And if you were to look at them out of context or without knowing that this was the photography gallery, you might look at them and think that you were looking at a painting.”
Bosworth’s work has been exhibited in, among other institutions, the Denver Art Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. So while at first it may seem as though “Sun Light Moon Shadow” is part of CMA’s efforts to showcase the work of artists living in Northeast Ohio or with another connection to it, that’s not necessarily the case.
“Barbara is somebody whose work I’ve been wanting to show for a long time and was just trying to find the right circumstance,” Tannenbaum says. “And the fact that she’s from here is great. But, you know, it wasn’t the deciding factor.”
Regardless, it means a lot to Bosworth to see her work hanging on these walls.
“Just incredible,” she says. “I grew up in these halls. … I took art classes here.
“All of my photographs stem from this landscape of Northeast Ohio, of Novelty — the woods and the stream in the forest. That’s all my work — and of this comes from that.”
‘Barbara Bosworth: Sun Light Moon Shadow’
Where: Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150 East Blvd.
When: Through June 30.
Admission: Free.
Info: ClevelandArt.org or 216-421-7350.
Lecture
In a Rupp Contemporary Artists Lecture at 2 p.m. March 2 in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium, Barbara Bosworth will speak about her photographs and the stories that shape them.
“Her imagery, highlighted for its ethereal beauty and emotional resonance, explores the intersections of nature, humanity, and memory,” a CMA news release states. “Through her biographical storytelling, attendees will gain insight into her artistic process, inspirations and the connections she forges between the natural world and human experience.”
The lecture is free but tickets are required.
