Why Ansley West Rivers Builds Her Own Landscapes - One Exposure at a Time
Welcome to this edition of [book spotlight]. Today, we uncover the layers of 'Seven Rivers Monograph,' by Ansley West Rivers (published by Aint Bad Publisher). We'd love to read your comments below about these insights and ideas behind the artist's work.
This is not what a river looks like. It’s what it feels like.
Ansley West Rivers does not photograph landscapes the usual way. She spends weeks exposing a single sheet of film, building one image from many places, many times of day. Her goal isn’t to document. It’s to create a different way of seeing something that often gets overlooked. The result is a body of work that feels quiet, slow, and deeply personal.
These are not typical nature photographs.
They are layered, sometimes surreal, and meant to hold your attention longer than a passing glance. Rivers run through every frame, but the story is also about motherhood, environmental change, and how life shapes art over time. Rivers feed cities, farms, and families. And they are changing fast.
This interview explores how one artist has been trying to keep up with them for over a decade.
The Book
Seven Rivers is a monograph by photographer Ansley West Rivers that explores the complex relationship between people, water, and place. Over the course of several years, Rivers traveled across the United States to photograph seven major waterways: the Colorado, Missouri, Columbia, Mississippi, Sacramento, Snake, and Rio Grande rivers. Using large-format film and a unique masking technique, she layered multiple exposures to create images that are both documentary and interpretive. The resulting photographs reflect the environmental, cultural, and personal significance of these rivers, offering a meditative look at the changing landscapes and the human impact on these vital water sources.
The book includes essays and writings that provide context to the images, discussing themes such as climate change, water rights, and the historical importance of these rivers. Seven Rivers serves as both an artistic endeavor and a commentary on the pressing environmental issues facing these waterways today. (ansleywest.com)
Do you remember the moment or maybe a particular photograph that first made you want to pursue photography seriously? What pulled you in?
You know, it’s interesting you ask that, because when I was a kid, my dad gave me this tiny 35mm point-and-shoot camera. I was in second grade. He was going on a business trip and gave me two rolls of film, saying, “If you shoot these, I’ll pay to develop them when I get back.” I think I shot both rolls within a day I was just mesmerized by photography.
Then in sixth or seventh grade, he helped me build a darkroom in one of our bathrooms. Since then, I’ve never really stopped taking photographs, and I’ve always worked in analog.
I grew up in the southern U.S., so early on I was exposed to a lot of Southern photographers Sally Mann was one, and then William Eggleston. I also remember seeing a lot of street and portrait photography at the beginning.
But I’ll never forget being shown Ansel Adams in high school maybe when I was 16 or 17 and falling in love with that photograph of the Snake River at the Oxbow in Grand Teton National Park. I bought a poster of it and hung it in my room. And then, funny enough, years later in my 20s, I ended up living just 30 minutes from that exact location.
Ansel Adams
So I think landscape photography grew on me over time. When I moved out to California, I started looking at Edward Muybridge and Carleton Watkins. I don’t know if there was just one photograph that did it but I remember specific images at different stages of life, and how they impacted me in different ways as I grew.
Do you see that as part of your evolving relationship with photography? Was there ever a breaking point a moment when you decided you were going to get more seriously involved?
You know, I’m not sure there was a single breaking point. My husband actually teases me about this he says we met when we were 15, and even then, I always knew exactly what I wanted to be. I always knew I wanted to be a photographer.
I fell in love with the medium really early on, and that feeling hasn’t left. I still remember putting my first piece of paper in the developer tray, and the magic I felt in that moment it’s still with me. I still work with film, using both medium and large format cameras. I also work with alternative processes like cyanotype and palladium.
There’s still so much to explore. I love doing long exposures, I love working at night, I love working in the day. Photography continues to hold this sense of magic and possibility for me.
So no, I don’t think there was ever one big decision or turning point. I honestly can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to pursue photography. People sometimes ask me since I do a lot of cyanotype and palladium printing, which involve painting on paper why not just become a painter or move into drawing? But I’m still completely fascinated by photography. It still feeds me as an artist, and I still feel like I’m pushing it into new directions. So if that answers your question… yes, it’s always been there.
What first drew you to rivers as a subject? Why did you decide to photograph them from source to sea?
Well, it really started in grad school. Up until then, through my teens and twenties, I had mostly worked with portraiture and, in a way, street photography. My first year of grad school was at California College of the Arts, which is a studio-based program. I was spending a lot of time in the studio, going through critiques, and continuing to work with portraits.
After that first semester, my husband and I decided to take a 25-day trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. He’s a farmer, so water has always been a big part of our lives. At the time, he was farming in California, and we were in the middle of a major drought. It was around 2011.
I’d been spending all this time setting up scenes in the studio, so I wanted a break. I brought my large format and medium format cameras on the river, and my goal was just to shoot as much as I could without worrying about what came of it. If the boat flipped, it flipped. I just wanted to make work without overthinking it. I also brought along John Wesley Powell’s book about his descent down the Colorado River in the late 1800s.
Reading that book while floating through the canyon and looking at the old watermarks on the canyon walls really hit me. This river has changed so much in just over a century. I started photographing on that trip, mostly black and white, with long exposures at night. When I got back to the studio, I developed everything. I didn’t lose any of the film, but I didn’t actually like the photographs I made.
Still, something had shifted. I realized I wanted to start talking about water. Our trip ended at Parker Dam, and just below it is one of the main sources of water for Los Angeles. You’re right there on the border between California and Nevada, but LA is a long way from that spot. And I doubt many people in LA have ever seen where their water actually comes from.
Same thing with San Francisco, where we were living at the time. Their water comes from the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park, which is also far removed from the city. So I started to see this big disconnect between the water that supports our lives in major cities and the places it actually comes from.
And looking at climate change and how things were changing really made a big impact on me. I knew I wanted to take photographs of water, but I didn’t want them to be straightforward documentation. I feel like, especially in the United States, water and certain environmental issues have become very politicized. And I wanted to get beyond that.
I wanted to make someone stop and really look at an image of the landscape or of water, more than just two seconds while scrolling through Instagram or glancing at the New York Times or wherever they get their news. I wanted the image to hold them for a moment.
So I decided to use a large format camera, but also to introduce masking as a way to invent my own landscapes. I wanted to use beauty as a tool to pull people in and make them question the image. Is that real? Where is that? What’s that line? Is that tree actually there? I wanted to play with perception and offer a different way of seeing the landscape, maybe a way people hadn’t looked at it before.
I started using masking tools directly on my large format film, covering off certain areas and building up new images. In a sense, I was inventing my own landscapes to tell the story of water.
In the beginning, I made a lot of mistakes. I had come up with this technique on my own, and at first, I thought I was going to photograph every river across the United States. But eventually, I decided to narrow it down to seven rivers that reflect the contemporary geography of the U.S., major population centers and the waterways that support them.
That’s why the project starts with the Hudson River in New York and moves west through the Missouri, the Colorado, the Tuolumne, and the Columbia Rivers.
I had been planning it throughout grad school, and when I finished in 2013, I got a residency in Montana at the headwaters of the Missouri River. That’s really where the project began. It changed a lot during COVID. I started looking closer to home, at my own water system, since I live in the Idaho and Wyoming area. I began focusing more on the Snake River.
So the project has shifted and evolved, but that’s really how it started.
Has that shift from the national to the deeply personal, your own watershed, changed your relationship to the landscape?
Yeah, it really has. The project started with a lot of travel. I was saving up money and going to specific places, usually with only a small window of time to photograph. Each trip required a lot of planning. I was following rivers by foot, by drift boat, camping along the way, driving from place to place, always moving.
But when COVID hit, I had to slow down and start looking at my own watershed, the local watershed of our community. That’s where my husband farms, and that’s where our farm is, so this water directly affects our livelihood as a family.
It was a big shift. At first, I had been going into other communities and other landscapes, but now I was looking closely at my own. I began to see how the seasons and the weather changed things. I started making the same pilgrimages to certain areas once a month. That repetition really deepened my knowledge and understanding of the place.
The landscape that feeds my family, where we go to camp and spend time outdoors, became even more important to me. In the West, we have a lot of campgrounds and public lands, and you can really see how drastically water is changing here.
I think looking at my own watershed has become a much richer subject for me. Especially in the West, you can see how the struggle for water is increasing. It is very visible, especially during certain seasons. In the summer, the low water levels are hard to ignore.
It has also been valuable to compare things over time. I started doing that in 2020, and over the past five years, I have been able to return to the same places at the same time of year. Showing those images in a sequence has added a lot of strength to the project.
What emotions do rivers evoke for you now that maybe did not surface when you began this work in 2013?
You know, when I first began this work in 2013, I did not have children. I think at the time I thought of it more as a political voice. And with my husband always working in agriculture, we were looking at water from both a business perspective and an activism perspective.
Now that I have kids, water has become even more emotional and personal to me. Realizing how quickly a lot of these places and waterways are changing, and knowing that I want them to be healthy for the future, for my children and their children, has shifted everything. Water has started to feel more connected to who I am as a mother, not just who I am as an artist. It is a deeper, more emotional relationship now.
You use a large format camera and later multiple exposures on a single negative. Can you walk me through what that process looks like and what it allows you to express that a single frame cannot?
Yes. It is a technique I have been playing with for a while now. For me, it is something I cannot get from a single image or a digital camera. It really speaks to the unique possibilities of film, especially with a single sheet of it.
Nothing is double exposed. I use a gridded back on my 4x5 or 8x10 camera. I might do two across or four down. Sometimes it takes me a week to take one photograph. I might shoot the sky in one place, then the foreground somewhere else, then a tree or a section of river in another location.
That process feels essential to the work because I do not think I could achieve the same effect using any other tools. Everything is a series of multiple exposures, but again, not double exposures. I spend a lot of time writing, sketching, and planning before I take the picture. On the back of my film holder, I will write down what I shot the sky at a certain time of day, what it looked like and then I start looking for another piece, maybe a part of the river that fits with it. Sometimes it is about telling a story through different elements in the landscape. It starts to feel a bit like drawing or piecing together a puzzle.
Your images aren’t meant to be documentary, but to portray an intimacy. What does that mean to you when it comes to photographing land and water?
I think about photographers like Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge, who I mentioned earlier. I have always loved their photographs, especially their images of the American West. Their work was really important in establishing many of our national parks, especially Yosemite in Watkins’s case.
Those images are stunning, and I do love them. But there is also a lot tied into Western expansion showing people on the East Coast what was happening in the West, encouraging migration, and helping bring attention to places like California when it was still fighting for statehood.
Their work helped protect certain places by supporting the creation of national parks, but it also played a role in promoting development. Now, as a mother who wants to see these places continue to exist into the future, I felt the need to take a different approach.
My work is not about expansion. It is about connection. I want these photographs to help people feel something for their own local watersheds, or even for watersheds they may never have seen. I want them to fall in love with these places. Because if you fall in love with something, maybe you will want to save it.
So I felt like the tradition of landscape photography, especially the work of those early pioneers I admire, had a different purpose for a different time. I wanted to approach it more emotionally, in a way that reflects my perspective in the present.
That is why I moved away from straightforward documentation. But I still want to be in conversation with those photographers. They have inspired my work for a long time.
For me, it is about working differently while still using some of the same tools. Those men had pack mules and went deep into the wilderness for weeks at a time, carrying their darkrooms and making those big, beautiful plates.
I am using similar equipment, but in my own way. I have been pregnant twice while making this work, and now I am out there with my kids and my husband. I may not have the pack mule setup, but I like the idea of working in the same realm just from a different perspective.
Is there a reason behind using that kind of equipment? Is it about nostalgia? Because I imagine that those early photographers used it because it was the latest and best technology at the time. But now, with all the tools and possibilities available to make photography easier, you choose a much more archaic method. Is there something about that period, or some kind of nostalgic feeling, that led you to use it?
Well, I do think it helps that I like where the tradition comes from, especially because of its voice and its analog nature. My process really can only be done this way, and that is a big part of what inspires me to create in the landscape using this masking technique with negatives.
But more than that, it helps slow me down. I want to move slowly through the landscape. This process trains my eye to notice things I might miss if I were moving quickly and shooting 2,000 images in a day. The slowness helps me see more.
It allows me to stay in one place longer, to look more carefully, even to pause for a picnic and really take in what is around me. I usually bring only six loaded pieces of film for each shoot.
So for me, it is not just about nostalgia. It is about the process. That slower process, and the way I build an image on a piece of film, is important to how the work is made. The equipment is part of that experience.
When I look at your images, they look beautiful, but they also show signs of environmental change, like drought, erosion, and human impact. When you are out in the field and witnessing those things, how do you decide what story to tell in the frame?
So usually, when I started this project, I was going to certain areas that I knew were affected by human activity. I think I shared with you the Hanford Reach photograph. I would visit places where major dams had been built, or where something significant had happened in the landscape related to water.
Hanford Reach, for example, is where a lot of the plutonium was produced for the atomic bomb during World War II. When you are on the Columbia River there, you would not necessarily know that just by looking around. So I spend a lot of time researching the history of each river not just in terms of population and settlement, but also environmental history and impact.
In that case, I went there knowing I wanted to tell that story. But the question was, how? Because often, you cannot actually see the evidence anymore. That site was declared a national monument in the early 1990s, and most of the original equipment is no longer visible.
But while I was there, I happened to see someone burning a fire near the river, and the smoke looked like a mushroom cloud. That moment allowed me to build an image that hinted at the history of the place. I was able to suggest what had once been there, even if you could not see it directly.
Another example is a photograph I made near a pulp mill. That image points to illegal dumping into the river. But if you just drove past that area along the highway, you might not notice anything. Photographing the mill and the pollution coming from it, and layering that over the river, allowed me to tell a story that is not immediately visible.
So I usually go into each place with an idea. It does not always work out, but I do a lot of research beforehand and come with a rough sketch in my mind of what I want to express.
Lately, I have also been working on things that are less immediate. For example, I shoot the same spot again and again over time. Being able to tell a story through five photographs taken year after year at the same river or lake shows how water levels are changing over time. That kind of visual comparison has become an important part of the work too.
Is there something you feel sets your photography apart from what we have already talked about? Something unique in your approach, or something you have discovered over the years that you would like to share?
Gosh, a lot. I have made so many mistakes, and I have made a lot of terrible images. But going through that has helped me create better work. I know that probably sounds like a cliché, but it is true.
From the beginning, I had this idea that I wanted to make my own landscapes. Landscapes that your eye does not necessarily see. I wanted to photograph what is not immediately visible. That has always been the driving force behind my work.
It is kind of contrary to what photography is usually understood to be. A lot of times, people look at a photograph and believe it because it is a photograph. They think, this must be exactly what the photographer saw.
But I wanted to flip that idea. I wanted to create something that challenges how people look at an image and what they assume is real. And I made a lot of mistakes trying to develop a technique that would let me do that. But those mistakes helped me refine my process.
I think what I have learned most over the past few years is how important those failures have been. They have helped me build a stronger technique, and they have shown me new directions. Even when something does not work, I try not to stop. I try to keep going and see what might come from it.
What advice would you give to other photographers who want to work on long-term environmental or conceptual projects?
You know, when I first started this project, I had a very rigid idea of what it was going to be. I had written things out and imagined exactly how the images would look and how I would make them. And I think, with photography being such a serial medium, we often work in series and want the work to feel cohesive.
When you look at strong projects, it can seem like the artist must have followed a strict set of rules or parameters. But I would say my best advice to someone wanting to do a long-term project like this is not to be too rigid with yourself.
Let things shift and change. I have been working on this project for over a decade now, and in that time, I have changed, life has changed, and allowing that change into the work has made it richer.
For example, becoming a mother completely transformed this project for me. Not being able to travel as much made me look more closely at my own surroundings, and in the end, that has made the work stronger. When I first started, I had completely different expectations and limitations I put on myself.
So I would say, let life shape your project. Be flexible with your process, especially over a long period of time. It makes the work more successful, and it also keeps you from getting stuck and making the same thing over and over again.
To discover more about this intriguing body of work and how you can acquire your own copy, you can find and purchase the book here. (ansleywest.com)
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