Author: Ansley West Rivers. Texts by Rachel Reese,
Erin Dunn, and Erin Halcomb.
Year: Aint Bad Publisher, 2019
Binding: Soft Cover
Language: English
Pages: 79 pp.
Size: 8 x 10 inches
ISBN: 978-1-944005-26-9

The first publication of American photographer, Ansley West Rivers, focuses on her Seven Rivers series. In 2013, West Rivers gave herself an assignment to photograph seven North American rivers—the Colorado, Missouri/Mississippi, Columbia, Rio Grande, Tuolumne, Altamaha, and Hudson—from source to sea, as they represent watersheds for major metropolitan regions and cities throughout the United States. Over the past six years, West Rivers has developed an important American document that narrates an evolving relationship between the built and natural environment in the 21st century.

West Rivers has come to view these North American watersheds with expanding emotion as she witnesses the beauty, degradation, and numerous changes occurring to all global water sources. Her struggle to depict the complicated waterscapes has inspired new photographic processes with her large format camera. The resulting photographs, taken from myriad perspectives with a meticulous and individual methodology, transform mundane river scenes into complicated and artistically masterful views that evoke the complexities affecting fresh water, including the visible imprints of humankind on nature. The resulting images are simultaneously beautiful and haunting in an attempt to challenge the viewer’s perspectives on the landscapes that sustain us.