Overview

In 1968 the photographer Richard Brown fulfilled a romantic childhood dream when he moved to the Northeast Kingdom, a remote corner of Vermont just barely entering the twentieth century. There he encountered a way of life that was fast disappearing, a land of sheep, cattle, work horses, wood-burning stoves, and small family-run farms far removed from the industrial Northeast. Determined to record it before it disappeared, he saw a pastoral vision where, ""for the briefest interval, a window opened and the spirit of Vermont's past-granite hills cleared and formed, hard lives lived and lost, struggle and endurance, a harsh land made starkly beautiful by nature and man-was made palpable."" He saw the land and also a people whose ""endless hours of backbreaking, monotonous work were spent with a quiet ferocity"" and who believed their ""age-old labors were a struggle waged against time itself labors that might just hold modernity at bay."" And Brown did record it, with an 8 x 10 large plate view camera. Not only the hauntingly beautiful landscape but also the people who stayed and worked the stubborn hills and ""did so with great but fierce attachment."" This is a great ode to an America that has passed before our eyes almost without comment or notice. It is a valiant, indeed a brilliant, effort to make the past tangible, to bring it back to life.

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9781567926057

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Reviews

Praise for Last of the Hill Farms “A striking book....an arresting, wistful portrait of an all-but-gone way of life.” —Boston Globe “His is an important vision: much of Vermont is still beautiful, but we need to see and appreciate the ideal if we are to preserve it. [His] photography expresses that ideal superlatively well.” —Vermont Life “In The Last of The Hill Farms, first impressions from these remarkable images give way to second, third and fourth appreciations, as all of the elements of Richard Brown’s rich compositions are caringly revealed. Vermont’s quilted patchwork of hard-scrabble Hill Farms, and the flinty Vermonters who scraped livings from them, are defining elements of Vermont’s heritage, deserving of this superb documentation. Carefully and skillfully setting fence stones and roof shingles one at a time, with weather-worn hands, these Vermonters helped forge our working economy and the fabric of our society, infused with the ethic and character of their New England persistence. They took pride in their land and what they achieved with it, and Richard Brown’s unforgettable images help us to take pride in them. All Vermonters can know their history is here. I value Richard Brown’s gift to us all.” —U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy “Mr. Brown is my favorite upcountry artist with a camera. His photographs have such a crisp luminosity I think I would recognize them anywhere. Uniquely, he captures the quality of northern light, whether it’s the beatification of a curly Dorset sheep or the stunning blow of sunlight hammering the east face of a snowed-in farmhouse.” —Maxine Kumin, The New York Times Book Review

Brown is my favorite upcountry artist with a camera. His photographs have such crisp luminosity I think I would recognize them anywhere. -- Maxine Kumin New York Times Book Review

Author Information

Richard W. Brown has published several books including The Soul of Vermont. His photographs have also appeared in The New York Times, Audubon, and Vermont Life.

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