$65.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover/PLC with jacket
320 pages with 188 color photographs by the author
and 1 color map
10.0″ x 11.875″ upright/portrait
ISBN: 978-1-938086-44-1
Published in December 2016
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
No e-book has been authorized.
The Trilogy of North American Waters: West Coast, East Coast, and Mississippi River (2020) by David Freese
ISBN: 978–1–938086–76–2 (click here for more details)
Events and Exhibitions
May 27 to October 7, 2022
David Freese Photographs: The Geography of Climate Change
Atrium Gallery, Jane Lutnick Fine Arts Center, Haverford College, Haverford, PA
Tuesday, February 7 at 6 PM
The Print Center, 1614 Latimer Street, Philadelphia, PA
Book signing and presentation
by David Freese
with text by Simon Winchester and Jenna Butler
In West Coast, David Freese changed the way we see the Pacific coastline. In East Coast, he presents an equally expansive photographic sojourn from Greenland to the Florida Keys.
The East Coast of North America is a wondrous, intriguing, yet threatened coastline. It zigs and zags for more than 5,500 miles and assumes a multifaceted, jigsaw shape from Greenland and the Arctic Circle, south to the Canadian Maritimes and then into the United States, ending at the Dry Tortugas in the Florida Keys near the Tropic of Cancer. In this companion book to his compelling West Coast: Bering to Baja, David Freese once again captures a vast coastal region—one that presently faces a major peril from the rising sea brought about by global climate change.
There are wonderful surprises here. The remote regions of Greenland, northern Québec, Labrador, and Newfoundland offer breathtaking beauty that many people would not normally associate with the East Coast. And then there are the multiple towns and cities, rivers, bays, and estuaries, wildlife refuges, parks, and beaches, and other coastal landscapes that create stunning images—from the ground and from the air—that reveal their fragility in the face of a rising sea.
In addition to Freese’s 188 photographs, Simon Winchester, a master storyteller, provides an informative and enlightening account of the geological underpinnings and climatic history of the Atlantic seaboard, including an ominous view of what lies ahead. Jenna Butler, an award-winning Canadian author, provides noteworthy commentary on Freese’s photographs, as she places the images in context with the expansive North American environment and explains the effects and risks of global warming to the populations of Canada and the United States.
East Coast: Arctic to Tropic is a major work of art and documentation, in which Freese discovers, for all of us, the inherent beauty of nature that hearkens to the origins of Earth and to the dangers we collectively face in our coastal Atlantic homes. In East Coast: Arctic to Tropic, we experience an extraordinary sequence of photographs that tells the Atlantic tale and reveals an ocean that lies in wait.
About
About the Author
David Freese was born in Mineola, New York, in 1946 and grew up in Garden City, Long Island, New York. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Rochester in 1968 and, soon after graduation, taught photography in the U.S. Army Signal Corps until 1970. During the following thirty-five years, Freese worked as a freelance assignment photographer shooting corporate/industrial and editorial photography on location. He also worked as a contract photographer for Gamma Liaison in New York City and for Zuma Press in San Clemente, California.
Personal work has always been an ongoing form of expression for Freese, and he now devotes his full attention to various fine-art photography books and projects and to teaching in the Film and Media Arts Department at Temple University, where he received the 2016 Adjunct Faculty Award for his many academic contributions. He has previously taught at Saint Joseph’s University, Moore College of Art, and Drexel University—all situated in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 2006, he was the founder and director of the photography degree program at Burlington County College in Pemberton, New Jersey, where he taught for twenty-five years and received the Excellence Award from the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development for outstanding contributions to teaching, leadership, and learning.
Freese’s work has been published in Communication Arts, MIT Technology Review, Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, Photo District News, Photo Insider, Polaroid International, Popular Photography, Smithsonian Air and Space, Time-Life Books, and View Camera. His photographs are featured on line at LensCulture and the Art Photo Index, and images have been published on line at aPhotoEditor and at Slate Behold, The Photo Blog. His photographs are in the collections of the Allentown Art Museum, Center for Creative Photography, Center for the Study of Place, Cleveland Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Haggerty Museum of Art, Haverford College, James A. Michener Art Museum, Library of Congress, Polaroid Collection, Russian Union of Art Photographers, University of California Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, and University of Wyoming Art Museum as well as in numerous corporate art collections.
Freese has been awarded artist grants in photography by the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. He has also received a Polaroid Artist Support Grant and both a Fellowship in the Visual Arts and a Special Opportunity Stipend from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He was selected as a participant in the Arctic Circle Expeditionary Residency in 2014. There, he met with twenty-six other artists of varying disciplines in Longyearbyen, Svalbard—a Norwegian archipelago about 800 miles (1,287 kilometers) from the North Pole—where they worked and sailed the islands on a tall ship.
Map by Morgan Pfaelzer.
Freese is also a member of the Society for Photographic Education and a former member and president of the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers. David Freese resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Freese is the photographer/author of West Coast: Bering to Baja and East Coast: Arctic to Tropic. He is also a member of the Society for Photographic Education and a member and former president of the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers. David Freese resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and his Website is www.davidfreesephoto.net.
About the Essayists
Simon Winchester is a journalist and New York Times best-selling author of more than twenty books, including The Professor and the Madman (1999), Krakatoa (2003), and The Man Who Loved China (2008). His most recent titles include Atlantic (2010), The Men Who United the States (2013), and Pacific (2015). In 2006, Winchester was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to journalism and literature. His Website is www.simonwinchester.com.
Jenna Butler is a Canadian ecocritic, organic farmer, beekeeper, and author of three critically acclaimed books of poetry and a collection of essays, A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge of the Grizzly Trail (2015). Butler’s work as an academic, creative writer, and ecocritic has taken her around the world, from the Deep South of the United States to the Arctic Circle onboard a barquentine sailing ship.
Slide Show
Uummannaq, Greenland 
Jacobshavn Ice Fjord, Greenland 
Qinngua Avannarleq Glacier, Head of Evigheds Fjord, Greenland 
Polar Bear, Cumberland Sound, Baffin Island, Nunavut 
Western Brook Pond, Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland 
Rocky Harbour and Tablelands, Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland 
Trans Canada Highway near South Branch, Newfoundland 
Port Hawkesbury, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia 
Hopewell Rocks, Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick 
Orrs Island off Maine Coast 
Boston, Massachusetts 
Orient Point, Long Island, New York 
New Jersey Turnpike along the Arthur Kill 
Cape May, New Jersey 
Fishermans Island, Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, Virginia 
Lamberts Point Coal Terminal, Norfolk, Virginia 
Herbert C. Bonner Bridge, Outer Banks, North Carolina 
Botany Bay, South Carolina 
Mangroves, Big Cypress National Presreve, Florida 
Miami Beach and Miami, Florida
Praise
“Freese’s sepia-toned images recall 19th-century landscape photography, and the use of the medium as a form of activism goes back to that era.”
—Allison Meier, Hyperallergic (read the full article here)
“From Greenland’s glaciers to the industrialized swamps of New Jersey, to the exposed Outer Banks to the Florida Everglades, David Freese reveals a remarkable graphic beauty all along North America’s ecologically vulnerable East Coast. His delectable images at once entrance us and warn us of the fragility of our coasts in the face of global warming and our human desire to live by the sea.”
—Stephen Perloff, Editor, The Photo Review (read the full article here)
“Once again, David Freese and his camera have captured the endless scenic variety of a continent’s edge. But these extraordinary images of North America’s East Coast do something more subtle as well—they help us see the vulnerability of a landscape poised on the brink of a changing climate. The result is both moving and sobering.”
—Michael Brune, Executive Director, The Sierra Club
“David Freese’s approach to photographing the North American landscape culminates in images that are both new and part of a tradition that can be traced back to that of the American Luminous tradition on through Western exploratory photography of William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, and Eadweard Muybridge during the nineteenth century. Those classic, pinpoint-sharp photographs sufficed with light became the source material for artists and lawmakers to preserve and value these landscapes before and after the Civil War. Freese’s vision, like those of his famous predecessors, connotes an artistic sensibility of hope and loss while inspiring awe and woe.”
—William Williams, Professor of Fine Arts and Curator of Photography, Haverford College
“David Freese’s compelling photographs depicting the Atlantic seaboard are both an invaluable historical record of what things look like now as well as a timely wake-up call to how easily coastal communities everywhere along the East Coast will be affected by a rising sea-level and increased extreme-weather conditions.”
—Jolene Hanson, Director, The G2 Gallery, Venice, California
“David Freese hadn’t considered an East Coast version of his book West Coast: Bering to Baja, a dramatic look at the West Coast of North America from the ground and from the air. That changed in 2012 when Superstorm Sandy struck and Freese visited New York and New Jersey. Once he saw the devastation, he decided to begin a project that showcased how the rising waters were affecting cities, islands, national parks, and national wildlife refugees through aerial photography on North America’s eastern shore (there are also images taken from the ground).”
—David Rosenberg, Slate (read the full article here, pdf)
Read an article in Italian here on il Post:
http://www.ilpost.it/2016/09/27/east-coast-cambiamenti-climatici-aumento-livello-mare/
“Here is a very beautiful, huge volume ideal for a coffee table.”
—George Erdosh, Manhattan Book Review
“A unique, thoughtful and thought-provoking photographic compendium, East Coast: Arctic to Tropic is certain to be an enduringly popular addition to personal, community, college, and university library. Indeed, it and it’s companion volume West Coast: Bering to Baja would make excellent library Memorial Fund acquisition choices.”
—Micah Andrew
“Exploring the jagged eastern coastline of North America with a mixture of aerial and land-based photography, Freese demonstrates the interconnectivity of land and sea, muting cityscapes and cultures to intensify the correlation between water and land… With these elegant reproductions, Freese has expertly documented the ageless and seemingly impermeable elements of the coast, as well as a threatened landscape facing the perils of climate change.”
—Amanda Quintenz-Fiedler, Photographer’s Forum
“It starts with a shot of the spartan landscape surrounding the town of Uummannaq in Greenland and ends with one of the Atlantic Ocean, Biscayne Bay, and North Miami Beach. In between are scores of black-and-white photos as fine as any you will ever see, including some of Philadelphia, the Delaware River, and the Schuylkill. As Simon Winchester notes, this is ‘a 5,000-mile display of venerable geologic pedigree… landscape that is stubborn and settled and vulnerable.'”
—Frank Wilson, The Philadelphia Inquirer
My Place
“On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” If W. C. Fields could see his city now, he would wholeheartedly agree.
Yes, I love wild places and dramatic coastlines, but I also love cities. So far, I’ve never met one I didn’t like. My wife and I both grew up in Long Island outside New York City. We moved to Philadelphia in 1971 when I had an opportunity to start my photographic career there. Philly’s reputation at that time was, to be kind, not great, but it was easy to see that some very good things were going on, and we found ourselves liking our new home straight away.
During our first week in Philly, a good friend drove us along East River Drive (later renamed Kelly Drive) beside the Schuylkill River toward Center City. We then continued around Eakins Oval in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and proceeded down Benjamin Franklin Parkway toward City Hall. I thought then, and still think now, that this is one of the most beautiful urban drives anywhere in the world.
As fortune would have it, we started our future in Philadelphia just as developers were realizing its potential, the restaurant scene was awakening, and some thoughtful urban planning was starting to pay off. By 1980, even the sports teams were winning. And once the artificial height limit of Billy Penn’s hat at the top of City Hall (548 feet) was broken big-time in 1986 by One Liberty Place (945 feet), a skyscraper building boom began. The skyline changed dramatically and appropriately reflected the changing city on all fronts. Progress was being made. Soon Philadelphia was gaining respect from the national media. Favorable and oftentimes glowing articles were appearing regularly in newspapers and magazines.
The “city of neighborhoods,” as Philadelphia is known, certainly has some major faults, as does any urban area―crime, uneven public education, and budget woes among them. Nevertheless, everything one would want out of a world-class city is here―art, culture, entertainment, history, music, restaurants galore, major sports teams, theater, top universities and colleges, sports, urban parks, a great zoo, effective transportation, reasonably priced housing, fabulous medical care, and continued planning for the future. The good reviews continue.
Sometimes known as America’s most livable city, we plan on staying in Philly―with frequent trips to the West Coast, of course.
Copyright © 2013 David Freese. All rights reserved.