Ausable River 1893

Curator: Let's turn our attention to this interesting page from what appears to be an aged journal featuring a mounted photograph. The piece, entitled "Ausable River", is dated 1893, and the image is attributed to Seneca Ray Stoddard. Editor: It has an unexpectedly calming effect. The river scene is dense, the light fractured. You sense the cool air and feel of water... a rather inviting space despite the close, perhaps claustrophobic framing by the surrounding foliage. Curator: Given that this image comes from a period of intense industrialization, one can imagine it capturing the need to remember nature, untamed and seemingly untouched, before its erasure from capitalist production and human impact. This imagery of retreat is hardly a novelty, but certainly significant. Editor: Precisely. This image seems to follow many familiar visual and cultural symbols, from the idea of a secret garden and passage into another realm to an enduring theme of humanity finding peace in liminal spaces between the tamed and the wild, and especially water. There are folk beliefs around such things which echo the visual appeal. Curator: Do you find a tension in that pastoral longing, considering the realities of that era—the environmental costs of logging, industrial runoff polluting waterways, not to mention that the benefits of nature were only accessible based on social status, specifically in this time, race and gender? The aesthetics, for whom? Editor: Absolutely. Yet that tension exists for many observers now. These themes are continuously redefined but not undone entirely, making a seemingly simple picture relevant even today. It becomes a site for examining that continued and unequal longing. Curator: So, this singular work becomes a portal, a starting point for intersectional discussion, about environmentalism and inequality? Editor: Yes, it makes an argument through the language of visual codes we all immediately, perhaps subconsciously, understand and feel a certain attachment to, thereby providing it's subtle yet durable potency. Curator: Indeed. A moment, perfectly still and seemingly serene. Editor: Which can mean very many things... across both time and circumstance.