Barbara Boissevain
These aerial shots are of industrial salt ponds that have existed in the South Bay since the1800's and are characterized by environmentalists as having taken away the lungs of the Bay. Currently they are a part of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, the largest wetland restoration program on the Pacific Coast which to date has restored over 3,000 acres and when completed will have cost over 100 million dollars. Over the course of the next sixty years, these salt ponds will go back to their natural state. Since 2010 I have gone up once a year in a helicopter to document this epic transformation and I plan to continue to go up once year to document these changes in the Bay as itÃs biodiversity dramatically increases.
Ghost Hanger
Barbara Boissevain is a visual artist and photographer whose work focuses on the impact of human activity on the environment.
Boissevain studied painting at Parsons School of Design in New York, and then went on to receive her B.F.A in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A. in Photography at San Jose State University.
She has exhibited her work widely, including international solo and group exhibitions in the USA and Europe. These include: Memoire De L’Avenir, Paris, France; the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA; Galerie Numero Cinq, Arles, France; the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland; and the David Brower Institute in Berkeley, CA. In 2009 she published “Children of the Rainbow,” a book and traveling exhibition that documents humanitarian problems due to climate change, facing Quechua communities in Peru. In 2021 her work was featured on NPR’s “The Picture Show” (in conjunction with the U.N. Climate Change Summit in Glasgow, Scotland) as well as on the PBS News show “Something Beautiful.”
Her art has been acquired by numerous public and private collections around the world, including the Google corporate collection. From 2014 to 2021, she was an artist in residence with the City of Palo Alto’s Cubberley Artist Studio Program in Palo Alto, California. In 2018 she was awarded an artist-in-residence in France at Galerie Huit in Arles, France in conjunction with the Les Rencontres de la Photographie Festival. In July of 2022 she was invited to Atelier 11 for a solo residency through L’AiR Arts international residency program in Paris, France.
Her upcoming book “Salt of the Earth” will be published by Kehrer Verlag in the Fall of 2023.