For more than thirty years Richard Brown has been taking photographs of his adopted home state of Vermont. Now he brings together his favorite images in this ode to the land and its people, to share his own deeply personal vision of this beloved and picturesque state. Richard Brown's Vermont has six seasons, not four. The familiar glory of fall foliage, when the hills are giddy with color, gives way to the austere "Off-Season", that brief November transition before the snow flies, when the bones of the landscape are revealed in fallow fields and the bare limbs of trees. In deepest winter the ubiquity of snow renders even more vivid those few colors that remain -- the cobalt blue of a shadow on snow, the warm red of a barn. "Mud and Maple" celebrates both the convivial season of flowing sap and the perennial indignities of impassable dirt roads. In the spring lambs frolic in greened-up pastures, and all-too-fleeting summer months bring a burst of industry to gardens and fields before September's frost. Brown's soulful images create a distinctive photographic portrait of Vermont's landscape. He chronicles with great affection the people who still work the land, and without sentiment celebrates a rapidly disappearing way of life.

Reviews

Brown is my favorite upcountry artist with a camera. His photographs have such crisp luminosity I think I would recognize them anywhere.--Maxine Kumin