Smithsonian online has republished a January piece from Modern Farmer about Peacham photographer Richard Brown, who has been documenting Vermont's rural ways and people since the 1970's. Both editions celebrate the release of Brown's photographs reproduced in a recently published book. "My camera," Brown writes, "bore witness to the worn-out and obsolete; the Jersey cows and Belgian draft horses; the ancestral portraits hung from crumbling plaster; and the region’s latest strata of human geology, farmers who faced my lens with forbearance and rough-hewn dignity."
Using an 8 x 10 view camera and working laboriously and diligently, Brown has developed a collection of images that capture a disappearing moment -- a time when farming seemed less like a photo-ready lifestyle choice and more of a destiny on the earth decreed by nature and human circumstance.
The images are reproduced in his book, The Last of the Hill Farms: Echoes of Vermont's Past published in 2017 by Godine. Funded through a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $30,000 from 358 backers, the book is a gorgeous, sepia-toned compendium of rural ways within a landscape of dramatic beauty and constant change.
According to his Kickstarter campaign, Brown is an editorial and fine art photographer based in Vermont who has has taught landscape photography workshops across the country and published over 25 books of his photographs in the U.S., Europe and Japan.
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