Ted Kawalerski: Shooting the Hudson

New York's Hudson River, for all its checkered history and boundless utility, has always inspired artists. The 19th century's Hudson River School of painters depicted the river and its shores in a more pristine state, but even now it's magnetic to photographers. Conservation photographer Robert Glenn Ketchum did his first color monograph about it (The Hudson River and the Highlands), and when American Photo once asked William Clift to name his favorite place to take pictures, the Santa Fe-based landscape photographer chose the Hudson's Constitution Marsh, which is right near the river town of Cold Spring.

No photographer I can think of, though, has photographed the Hudson with such devotion as Ted Kawalerski. Himself a resident of the Westchester river town of Sleepy Hollow -- yes, that Sleepy Hollow, the home and literary province of Washington Irving -- Kawalerski has spent his commercial career on corporate work for Xerox, Bausch and Lomb, MasterCard and their like. For the last twenty years, though, he has made it his personal project to shoot the mighty Hudson up and down, all the way to its upstate source, Lake Tear of the Clouds. Click on the picture here to see a gallery from Kawalerski's unique photographic endeavor.

Some of Kawalerski's handsome photographs show the river untainted, but most include the human development that, frankly, makes it a more interesting subject. In fact his best pictures explore where and how nature and development intersect, as you can see from the accompanying gallery. These images, which include environmental portraits of the people who inhabit the Hudson's banks, also give special attention to light and what the river seems to do to it.

Kawalerski makes beautiful large-format inkjet prints of the images, the older ones from scans of film (shot mostly with the Canon EOS-1V), newer ones from the Canon EOS-1D (Mark II and III) digital SLR. You can see them through February 23 at Manhattan's MV Gallery, whose proprietor Jim Megargee does custom printing for photographers such as Jim Nachtwey and Antonin Kratochvil. (The gallery is at MV Labs, 33 Little W. 12th Street, and is open Monday through Friday from 10:00 to 5:00, Saturday from 1:00 to 5:00, or by appointment. Check it out!