Artists Barbara Bosworth and Emily Sheffer presented an artist talk about their work with Dust Collective, a publisher specializing in small-edition, handmade photography books, at the February PHSNE meeting. This meeting is now available as a recording—watch below!

Emily Sheffer founded Dust Collective in 2017. Each Dust Collective book is skillfully designed, showing close attention to material and the beauty of the photographic image. Dust Collective publishes works that address landscape, often as metaphor, memory, home, and narrative space. Themes such as climate, ecology, migration, and our changing environment often shape these “landscape stories.” Dust Collective operates out of Sheffer’s home studio in New England.

Sheffer and Bosworth have collaborated on several artist books, including Some Lights Are From Fires, Diana’s Baths, Swifts, From Where the Sun Now Stands, and Light of the Eclipse. Their creative partnership involves Sheffer as designer and Bosworth as artist.

Their most recent publication, Evening: The Meadow, marks the 10-year anniversary of Bosworth’s 2015 publication, The Meadow. This special edition features 21 previously unpublished images from the series, accompanied by poems by D’Anne Bodman, the former owner of the meadow. This special, limited edition was handcrafted by Bosworth and Sheffer.

Emily Sheffer is a photographic artist, educator, and book designer. She is the founder of Dust Collective. Her work examines the relationship between landscape, time, and materiality, using photography and book arts to explore narratives within the natural world. Through these artworks, she invites viewers to touch, feel, and move through layers of history, geology, and myth, encouraging a reflection on our relationship with landscape. Sheffer earned her MFA in photography from The University of Hartford and her BFA in photography from The Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She currently lives in Massachusetts.

Bosworth is a photographer whose large-format images explore both overt and subtle relationships between humans and the natural world. Whether chronicling the efforts of hunters or bird banders or evoking the seasonal changes that transform mountains and meadows, Bosworth’s caring attention to the world around her results in images that inspire viewers to look closely. All of Bosworth’s projects remind viewers that we shape nature and, in turn, are shaped by it.

Bosworth grew up in Novelty, Ohio. She currently lives in Massachusetts, where she is a professor emeritus of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Her work has been widely exhibited, notably in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, and the Peabody Essex Museum.