$50.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
336 pages with 209 toned photographs (printed in 4-color) by the author (including 7 foldouts), 1 historic cyanotype photograph, and 4 color maps
11.875″ x 11.5″ landscape
ISBN: 978-1-938086-73-1
Published in July 2020
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
No e-book has been authorized. Published in association with the Aegon Transamerica Foundation and the American Land Publishing Project.
The Trilogy of North American Waters: West Coast, East Coast, and Mississippi River (2020) by David Freese
ISBN: 978–1–938086–76–2
Events and Exhibitions
Tuesday, November 29, 2022 at 4:30pm
“Tales of the Landscape and Dire Warnings. A Photographer’s Odyssey”
Visiting Lecturer Series at Haverford College, Chase Hall, Ardmore, PA
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
Friday, January 29, 2021 from 2-3pm
Online Artist Talk: David Freese, My Photography Book Odyssey
Zoom online event (register here)
Friday, September 18, 2020 from 4pm
Bookish: An Indie Shop for Folks Who Read, Fort Smith, AR
Zoom online event: Contact Sara at sara@bookishfs.com
Friday, October 2, 2020 from 5pm
Cavalier House Books,
Denham Springs, LA
Online event – Live on Facebook, YouTube, and Periscope
Monday, January 27, 2020 at 10am
Book signing at Casemate’s ALA booth
by David Freese
with essay by Simon Winchester and a foreword by Sarah Kennel
America’s most important and iconic river has had many names: from the Ojibwe word misiziibi, meaning “a great river spread wide over the land,” to the more familiar Mighty Mississippi, Old Blue, and Ole Man River. In Mississippi River: Headwaters and Heartland to Delta and Gulf, the third book of David Freese’s trilogy on North American waters, the photographer takes us on a captivating visual journey from the river’s source at Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota 2,552 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico.
Freese’s photographs—from the ground and from the air—open our eyes to encompass the river’s diversity and complexity as seen from its cities, towns, and hamlets, its industrial sites and farmland, its historic buildings and sanctuaries for wildlife, all the while revealing the constant flow of goods, grain, and fuel up and down the nation’s major shipping artery. The photographs also illustrate the ongoing dangers posed by increased flooding and the protective measures historically taken by the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers in trying to fulfil an impossible task: of keeping a restless and often swollen and unruly river in check.
There is great pressure on America’s biggest river in the way we manage and treat it, and we can be thankful for the establishment of wildlife sanctuaries and the passage of environmental legislation that enhances the quality of our waters, air, and soils. But too often there are negative environmental consequences to our way of life, ranging from (ironically) the loss of habitat affecting millions of birds and other wildlife to poisonous runoff from pesticides and herbicides on agricultural fields. As one encounters the river, one must also remember that, throughout its vast watershed, the Mississippi was initially the great river for native peoples who were systematically removed from their homelands; and, as Freese journeys downriver, one is also reminded of the dark legacy of slavery, especially in the South.
The Misiziibi reveals America’s complicated past and present and hints at its future like no other river. American history truly bends and turns in its waters. To complement the photographic journey, acclaimed author Simon Winchester provides one of the most compelling short histories of the Mississippi yet written and Sarah Kennel, Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, places Freese’s images into the canon of landscape photography as a magnificent body of work that documents, critiques, honors, and sanctifies America’s most treasured river. David Freese concludes his remarkable book with a provocative afterword and extensive notes on many of his photographs.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
Read a review in Photo Review Newsletter July-Aug 2020
Read an interview with David Freese in the Dubuque Telegraph Herald (pdf 8/2020)
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.
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 Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World (2018), Pacific (2015), The Men Who United the States (2013), Atlantic (2010), The Man Who Loved China (2008), Krakatoa (2003), and The Professor and the Madman (1999). In 2006, Winchester was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II for “services to journalism and literature.” His Website is www.simonwinchester.com.
Sarah Kennel joined the High Museum in Atlanta in 2019 as the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography. She previously served as the Byrne Family Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and as a curator in the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She has curated many exhibitions and authored numerous publications, including Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris (2013), In the Darkroom: An Illustrated Guide to Photographic Processes before the Digital Age (2010), and In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet (2008).
Slide Show
The Mississippi River is a beloved, often romanticized character in American history, as reflective of American land and life as any other American place. The United States depends on the Mississippi like no other river, and it is my hope that my photographs—from the ground and the air—convey the wonder, complexity, and depth of its being. My journey was as full and as wide and as rapturous as the river itself. It was a head-turning experience to drive and fly its length, in different seasons, to witness its sublime scenery and changing landscapes, to visit its charming communities and impressive cities, and to meet the lovely, welcoming people who live along it, many of whom produce and bring food, fuel, and cargo to the entire nation and world. Yet it was often difficult to drive and fly over places that witnessed slavery and the forced removal of native peoples. And the journey was, at times, tempered by an anger at ongoing environmental harm and neglect. We, as citizens and stewards, have created the contradictions. But, as sure as water seeks the shortest path downhill, the Mighty Mississippi will always find its true way.
Praise
“David Freese captures the magic, majesty, and muddy squalor of the Mississippi River. Through images that report, rhapsodize, and editorialize, he depicts the river as a giver of life and a source of peril, a wellspring for agriculture and industry, and a means of transportation, recreation, and contemplation.”
—Barbara Tannenbaum, Chair of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs and Curator of Photography, Cleveland Museum of Art
“With Mississippi River: Headwaters and Heartland to Delta and Gulf, David Freese has created an extensive portrait of the massive life force that runs through the North American continent. His photographs acknowledge and chronicle diverse aspects, from engineering projects and human involvement to flora and fauna, from map-like aerial overviews to intimate vignettes. The scope and thoughtfulness of his photographic perspective, along with the richly descriptive essay by Simon Winchester and foreword by Sarah Kennel, offer insight into the significance of the Mississippi not just for those who live in its watershed, but for all Americans. Taken together with Freese’s surveys of North America’s East and West Coasts, we can appreciate the intrinsic way that our cultural and economic histories are written in the land and how the keys to our future—especially in light of climate change—are visible along the Mississippi as well.”
—Rebecca A. Senf, Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography and the Norton Family Curator of Photography, and author of Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe
“It seemed appropriate that, as I read this book, record rainfall in the Midwest brought Mississippi River levels to an all-time high as an early-season hurricane was barreling toward New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Get David Freese’s wonderful book, Mississippi River: Headwaters and Heartland to Delta and Gulf, to gain an understanding of how natural forces are combining with human-caused climate change and questionable decision-making to create a perfect storm of societal consequence.”
—Michael E. Mann, Director, Penn State Earth System Science Center and author of The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying our Politics, and Driving us Crazy
“The book, showcases a masterful visual journey from its source at Lake Itasca in Minnesota 2,552 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. Mississippi River: Headwaters and Heartland to Delta and Gulf … includes an essay by Simon Winchester and a foreword by Sarah Kennel, Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Freese’s photographs reveal a wide diversity of industry and farmland, cities and towns, landscapes and wildlife, and the constant flow of goods, grain, and fuel, up and down the country’s major shipping artery. “
—Aline Smithson, Lenscratch (read full article here)
“I wish I could carefully slice a few pages out of David Freese’s book and coil them tightly in waterproof bottles. I’d address them to my St. Louis ancestors and float them downhill into the past. Maybe if they knew what was coming, they could try to do something about it.”
—Julianne Couch, Daily Yonder (read full article here)
“A simple delight to browse and page through one duo-tone image at a time, Mississippi River: Headwaters and Heartland to Delta and Gulf showcases memorable aspects of an iconic American river. A remarkable compendium of equally remarkable photography, Mississippi River: Headwaters and Heartland to Delta and Gulf is very highly recommended for personal contemporary American photography collections, and would make an ideal memorial gift acquisition selection for community, college, and university library collections.”
—James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief, Midwest Book Review
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.