Art: Tranquility Preserved

Walden Pond is the birthplace of the modern national and international environmental movement, and 19th-century American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau is widely regarded as the movement’s father. His writings focused on the beauty and wonder of the place that fed his desire for all people to experience nature. With the exhibit Thoreau’s Walden: A Journey in Photographs, Scot Miller illustrates why environmentalism crosses social and cultural lines.

The ponds, meadows, marshes and lakes that inspired Thoreau also inspired Miller. His 29 color photographs span a five-year period and four seasons, focusing on the panoramic and minute beauty of the Massachusetts countryside.

Thoreau lived for two years in a cabin he built on Walden Pond. His retreat from civilization was as much a personal exploration as it was an expedition into the natural world. In 1999 Miller began to retrace Thoreau’s footsteps. The exhibit is a photographic journey reminiscent of that taken by Thoreau more than 150 years ago.

Miller’s life-long commitment to conservation is apparent in his career as a nature photographer, but his commitment goes beyond that; he donates a percentage of his Walden Woods photography sales to the nonprofit Walden Woods Project.

Just as Thoreau wrote in detail about every aspect of the changing weather and plant-life of his natural neighborhood, Miller documents with images of the area.

In one photograph, trees with brilliant red, yellow, gold and green leaves border a glass-like Walden Pond; the next image depicts naked trunks and branches ringing a frozen surface covered with snow, bearing a lone ice-fisherman heading for home at sunset.

The emergence of a single fern frond from a bed of old leaves and birch trees move the exhibit inland. Walden Woods, Heywood Meadow and Pine Hill were “sparsely wooded in 1846, the land having been heavily logged to make way for farmlands and bustling towns,” according to a sign accompanying the photographs. It’s hard to believe when looking at the aerial photograph of the southern end of the pond — a puddle in the midst of a green forest.

“Beyond Walden: The Legacy of Henry David Thoreau” is an eight-minute video summarizing the author’s writing and views, including civil disobedience as “a moral imperative … as protests to oppression and servitude.” It’s possible to believe his commitment to passive resistance could have come from the observing the freedom experienced by the living things in his adopted world.

A picture of the quintessential misty sunrise on a quiet lake portrays the peace and tranquility Thoreau frequently wrote about. The image of a boat with a lone fisherman floating in the middle of Walden Pond makes it easy to understand why his journals were filled with musings about humanity’s place on this earth.

“The simplest and most lumpish fungus has a peculiar interest to us,” Thoreau wrote in his journal on Oct. 10, 1858, “compared with a mere mass of earth, because it is so obviously organic and related to ourselves, however mute. It is an expression of an idea; growth according to natural law; matter not dormant, not raw, but inspired, appropriated by spirit.”

This passage is one of the many samples of his work accompanying the photographs. The exhibit also includes rare specimens and artifacts connected to Thoreau and the environment of Walden, as well as a hands-on nature station and nature activity cards designed to engage families in local forest ecology.

This complete Thoreau experience was developed by the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH). It’s the second local exhibit resulting from the Cincinnati Museum Center’s partnership with HMNH. When the exhibit closes later this spring, the Museum Center will manage its national tour. Grade: B+

This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2006.