New England Survey Online

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About New England Survey Online

The Photographic Resource Center in Boston invites you to share your work with our new topical Flickr group, New England Survey Online. This is an opportunity for all to share and discuss landscape photographs which resonate with “New England Survey,” a photography exhibition inspired in part by Robert Francis’s poem “New England Mind" (March 28 - May 11, 2008). The exhibition poses the question: “What is New England about New England landscape?”

As we are looking for a state of mind and a sense of place that is unique to this region, we especially encourage landscape work that is less straight up documentary in nature, and more created to evoke a feeling - akin to poetry (of course it can be both, but you get the idea). We invite you to post your thoughts about this issue as well as any information on your images (and even poems too!). You can read the exhibition's essay and see images online at www.prcboston.org/newenglandsurvey.htm

Writing in a small hut he called Fort Juniper in Amherst, Massachusetts, Francis (1901-1987) wrote in part in "New England Mind":

…My mind matches this understated land …
Having lived here the years that are my best,
I call it home. I am content to stay.
I have no bird's desire to fly away.
I envy neither north, east, south, nor west.

My outer world and inner make a pair.
But would the two be always of a kind?
Another latitude, another mind?
Or would I be New England anywhere?

http://www.prcboston.org/newengland.htm