For a year, in every season, Lisa McCarty photographed the sites in Concord, Massachusetts where the Transcendentalists lived and wrote. Transcendental Concord brings together those pictures. The town was the center of the mid-nineteenth-century literary and philosophical movement, and its core circle was close: Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau lived within a few miles of each other for nearly twenty years, meeting in one another’s homes and along the paths of Walden Woods to discuss their writings and beliefs. McCarty’s photographs attend to that shared ground, registering the environment and the shifts of season and light.
According to the publisher, the book’s method is inseparable from its subject. McCarty works with long exposures and camera movement, so that trees, water, and weather appear as durations rather than fixed landmarks. The publisher frames the project as an homage to Transcendentalism carried out through both the landscape and the technique: sustained observation of natural phenomena, together with an openness to experimentation and chance. Photographing the same terrain across a full seasonal cycle gives the book its structure and its patience.
Radius Books issued the collection in hardcover at 8 by 10 inches, with texts by Rebecca Norris Webb and Kirsten Rian. That pairing matters. Webb and Rian are writers attentive to photographs, and their contributions place McCarty’s images in a literary and historical frame rather than leaving them as a guide to preserved sites. Throughout the sequence, named history and unnamed landscape remain in tension, between places that can be pointed to and atmospheres that resist pointing.
For collectors drawn to landscape work in which subject and means are difficult to separate, this is a considered book. It asks what remains of a philosophy once its authors are gone, and answers with light, weather, and the slight blur of a long exposure. The Concord sites, the year-long seasonal cycle, the long-exposure technique, and the accompanying essays give the volume a specific and coherent identity.
