Michael Kolster: A River Lost and Found
By Janelle Lynch
June 2012
Published by Loupe
Journal of the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University
Guest Editor: Janelle Lynch
In 1971, Wendell Berry, the conservationist, poet and philosopher wrote The Unforeseen Wilderness advocating for the preservation of Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s (1925-1972) evocative photographs of the landscape accompanied the text.
About the photographic artist, Berry wrote, “His search is a pilgrimage, for he goes along ways he does not fully understand, in search of what he does not expect and cannot anticipate. His understanding involves a profound humility… he has done away with expectations, he has ceased to make demands upon the place.”
In his current series, A River Lost and Found: The Androscoggin River in Time and Place, Michael Kolster embodies the perspective of both of these men as he approaches his subject with respect and an open mind. He is at once an explorer seeking to learn about the environment in which he’s chosen to make his home, as well as an image-maker intent on seeing, without preconception, the natural world.
A River Lost and Found is a collaborative project with Matthew Kingle, an environmental historian and a colleague at Bowdoin College, where Kolster has taught photography since he moved to Brunswick, Maine in 2000. Kolster makes images and videos, Klinger writes essays, and together they research archives and record oral histories of those who have a connection to the river.
For nearly four years, Kolster has photographed along sixty miles of the Androscoggin and its environs in color and black and white using film and digital technologies. In the last year, he has also incorporated the ambrotype into his practice. Employing his cameras as, what Berry called, instruments of perception or discovery, Kolster came to know the river, infamous for its extreme contamination as well as for inspiring the 1972 Clean Water Act.
Last year, Kolster was drawn to the ambrotype after identifying parallels between the Androscoggin’s history and the alternative process, connecting its invention in 1851 with the period of industrialization that led to the river’s demise. Ambrotypes are made on polished glass plates, coated with a collodion emulsion and a layer of silver nitrate, rendering them light-sensitive. After the wet plate is exposed, processed and dried, it is finished with a varnish. Kolster uses an 8 x 10 inch view camera to expose the plates and, when in the landscape, a portable darkroom to prepare and process them. They are highly detailed images on glass from which prints can also be made.
As his extensive inquiry and poetic vision suggest, Kolster has formed a bond with and commitment to the river—not to save it, as was the quest of Berry and Meatyard in relation to the Red River Gorge, but to dignify it, perhaps for the first time in its sullied history. Together, his ambrotypes are imbued with a relentless wish to understand the place, the changes that have occurred there and how they affect and are a mirror of life.
An exhibition of A River Lost and Found will open in July 2012 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and in November 2012 at the College of Southern Maryland. Kolster is pursuing a concurrent project, along the James River in Virginia, in collaboration with the painter, Erling Sjovold.
Michael Kolster’s ambrotypes are made with an 8 x 10 inch camera using the wet plate collodion process.