Henry David Thoreau photography

Herein, is a highlight of the photographic work of a Concord woman, Esther Howe Anderson, born 40 years after Thoreau's death, who was a photographer to the landscape of the writer. Her interpretation is not political. It is observant. Thoreau's observation has always been the foundation of his works. Esther found herself through her camera in the late thirties, after the Depression and before the World War. She observed and photographed, and reading Thoreau, found a similarity in his observations and her pictures. She created and gave slide lectures for many years thereafter. The original slide lecture is now online, here, and soon to be a book. Her picture of the original founding members of The Society, here


Esther Howe Anderson
 Thoreauvian Photographer

Thoreau Creed


"I wish so to live ever as to derive my satisfactions 
and inspirations from the commonest events, everyday phenomena, 
so what my senses hourly perceive, my daily walk, the conversation 
of my neighbors, may inspire me, and I may dream of no heaven but 
that which lies about me." Thoreau  [March 10, 1856]

Mission


I've searched my faculties around,
To learn why life was to me lent;
I will attend the faintest sound,
And then declare to man what God hath meant.  HDT

*I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life. [ThoreauWalden 118]

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me
that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. [Walden] 


Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance

"Methinks there is [equal] need of a

 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance,

 what we will call Beautiful Knowledge,

 a knowledge useful in a higher sense:

 for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge

 but a conceit that we know something, which robs us

 of the advantage of our actual ignorance?"


CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY, William Munroe Special Collections

Esther Howe Anderson slide transparencies are here.