Between Land and Sea: The Great Marsh
Photographs by Dorothy Kerper Monnelly
Foreword by Jeanne Falk Adams, Essay by Doug Stewart
No landscape photographer at work today has done more to focus attention on the spectacular beauty of New England’s threatened coastal marshes than Dorothy Kerper Monnelly. Her body of work has helped inspire a growing movement to protect this fine-tuned, biologically rich ecosystem—long maligned as a wasteland—from human encroachment and irreversible damage. For more than 35 years, her life and work has been inextricably tied to the rise and fall of tidal creeks, the seasonal shifts in the marsh’s flora and fauna, and the ever-changing skies illuminating the shifting dunes and prairie-like sweep of spartina alterniflora. For Monnelly, the salt marsh is both artistic muse and spiritual anchor, a place that inspires her work as an artist and grounds her life as a community member, activist, and woman.
“As a photographer, Monnelly has a rare sense and perception of what I think of as the thoroughness of place, knowing the Great Marsh and its nuances intimately, much as did Ansel Adams the Sierra Nevada and his beloved Yosemite National Park.” — Jeanne Falk Adams
“Monnelly beautifully captures the spacious tranquility of her subject in images of a single oak leaf lying on a round mass of rough grasses near the rippling stillness of a tidal stream…. But her eye extends beyond nature documentation to more painterly, abstract visions: the grainy rhythms of wave-washed sand at Crane Beach and huge tree shadows falling across partly melted and powdery snow.” —Publisher’s Weekly, Book Review
Published by George Braziller, Inc., 2006
10 in x 13 in, 120 pgs, 57 b&w plates, Hardcover
PURCHASE BOOK (Amazon.com)