Photograph, pigment inkjet print.  Dimensions:  13" by 19"

Artist's Statement, The Meadows:

"There is a section of Northampton, Massachusetts called The Meadows.  It is a vast tract of land close to the city's downtown, bordered to the east and south by the Connecticut River.  While the land within it is mostly used for agriculture, there is also a small airport, a marina and a fairground within its boundaries, as well as a number of homes.

For more than twenty years I have walked, driven or bicycled through this land, often very early in the morning.  It is, for me, a place to explore, to walk my dog, to think and to photograph.

The views from and within The Meadows change with the seasons.  At times, the corn is so high that it is not easy to see much else when you walk near the fields.  At other times, a mist is suspended over the river that clouds the view of the small mountains to the south.  It is from atop one of these peaks that Thomas Cole saw and painted his famous work, 'The Oxbow,' in 1836.  Cole's painting is widely interpreted as a portrayal of the struggle between wilderness and civilization.

Today The Meadows cannot accurately be described as wilderness, but it is still the broadest expanse of undeveloped land in Northampton.  The contemporary struggle is, perhaps, the city's attempt to preserve and balance the mixture of uses of the land in a way that benefits all who live, work, or spend recreational time there.  While much of what goes on in The Meadows is peaceful, it is often a place for illegal dumping, vandalism, shooting, joyriding or partying.

Sometimes there is interplay between light and the elements of this landscape that allows the possibility of photographs that can serve as metaphors for the thoughts and feelings I experience as I walk.  At other times I have been drawn to the magic of a particular moment of a season or of a day in that place.  It is, ultimately, a landscape whose rhythms, textures, uses and appeal are both unique and yet also typical of New England."

Stephen Petegorsky is an artist and freelance photographer who was born in New York City and who has lived in the Northampton area for over 30 years.  His work has been exhibited internationally, and is in collections throughout this country as well as in Europe.  He graduated from Amherst College, and later received an M.F.A. in Photograpy from Rhode Island School of Design.  He has taught at Amherst, Smith, Hampshire Colleges and the University of Connecticut. 

He has made black and white landscape images for most of his photographic career.  For many years he has also made pieces that involve transferring Polaroid emulsions onto boards covered with gold leaf.  Since 1998 he has worked as a volunteer with a group that has started prosthetics clinics in Central America.  His photographs, documenting their efforts in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Ethiopia, became the basis for his most recent body of creative work.