"Certainly by middle age, one knows that ours is a paradoxical universe, that all times, all lands, all selves are an alloy of scar and grace, that blight may turn to beauty and beauty to blight, like mischievous changelings teasing the stolid.”
– "Watershed,” Emily Hiestand
I was given a Brownie camera when I was nine, and have been making photographs ever since. I have photographed in faraway places—the Orkney Islands, Kamakura, Belize—and in places closer to home: the Everglades, the American South, urban forests, Donna’s jazz club, Penobscot Bay, and many marginal zones of the Boston metropolis.
The four pictures on this page are from a series about boatyards and are part of an ongoing focus on organic processes, mutability, and closely seen detail. What links the subjects of my photographs is a focus on trying to see and articulate forms of wealth that do not, and cannot, appear on a consumer gauge.
In art school I studied painting as well as photography; for many years I practiced as an art director, and later began to publish books: The Very Rich Hours (travel stories); Green the Witch Hazel Wood (poems), and most recently, Angela the Upside-Down Girl (stories about American life).
Although I have an abiding affection for marks made by hand, I love photography in part because it accepts elements and echoes of my other media—and because the camera is a terrific traveler. I work with a digital camera and an old, nearly vintage Nikon. My visual works have been exhibited, and collected, appear on book covers and publications, and in a series of fine art cards from Ebb Tide Editions.
Thank you for looking!
Emily
American Poster Award, PRINT
The CASE Medal
Discovery / The Nation
Silver Medal, Boston Art Director’s Club
The Whiting Award
The National Poetry Series Award
The Pushcart Prize
The Best of Pushcart Prize
The National Magazine Award
Grants, Massachusetts Cultural Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities
