WIN $150 GIFT VOUCHERS: ALADDIN'S GOLD
Sandy Sorlien is the author of the best-selling book, Fifty Houses: Images from the American Road (John Hopkins, 2002). For decades she has traveled America’s back roads and city streets, and the length of her native Schuylkill River Valley, photographing the built and natural environment. She has received three Fellowships in Photography from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a Commonwealth Speaker Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Humanities, and 2020 and 2021 Fellowships from the Charles E. Peterson Fund of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. She taught photography at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia for twelve years and at several other area schools. In 2013, she joined the Fairmount Water Works, the education center for the Philadelphia Water Department, as a watershed educator and environmental photographer. For many years she rowed an open-water single shell on the slackwater pools of the Schuylkill Navigation. After living twenty-seven years near the Manayunk Canal, Sorlien moved with her husband to Rhode Island, where she rows on Narragansett Bay. John R. Stilgoe is the Robert and Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape Development at Harvard University and a Fellow of the Society of American Historians. He has also received the American Society of Landscape Architects’ Williams Medal and the American Institute of Architects’ Medal for collaborative research, among other awards. His ten books on landscape include What Is Landscape? (MIT, 2015), Old Fields: Photography, Glamour, and Fantasy Landscape (Virginia, 2014), Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape (Virginia, 2007), Landscape and Images (Virginia, 2005), Lifeboat (Virginia, 2003), Alongshore (Yale, 1994) and Common Landscape of America: 1580–1845 (Yale, 1982), winner of the Francis Parkman Prize for best book of American history. Mike Szilagyi, AICP, serves as Trail Project Manager at Schuylkill River Greenways National Heritage Area and serves as Chair of the borough Historic Commission. He has spent decades devoted to planning southeastern Pennsylvania’s bicycle trail network, yielding a deep knowledge of the long-forgotten web of former railroad and canal rights-of-way built before the automobile came to dominate the landscape. A lifelong cyclist, Szilagyi is the author of Bucks County Trolleys (Arcadia, 2020) and co-author of Montgomery County Trolleys (Arcadia, 2018). Karen Young is Director of the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center, the watershed education arm of the Philadelphia Water Department. Ms. Young has more than twenty-five years of experience developing and implementing urban environmental programs.
I hope many Schuylkill walkers like me discover her book. Then it's up to us to answer the [...] question: How do we preserve this remarkable history? --Mike Weilbacher, Executive Director of the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia Holding a very special appeal for readers with an interest in landscape photography, photographic equipment and techniques, and regional American history, Inland is an extraordinary, beautifully presented, impressively informative, and highly recommended addition to personal, professional, community, college, and university library Contemporary Photography and American History collections... -- Midwest Book Review Inland does more than reconstruct a canal system and identify a profoundly troubling environmental past--it offers perspective that informs our present as we consider our current activities and their generational impacts. --Byron Wolfe, Professor, Program Head, and Graduate Advisor in Photography, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, and author of Drowned River: The Death and Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado (2017) with Rebecca Solnit and Mark Klett Inland is, most of all, a work of the historical imagination, recovering for the viewer the significance of the long-lost canal system... Sandy Sorlien achieves a perfect synthesis of documentary and aesthetic modes. I can't think of another who combine the talents of Sorlien. --Miles Orvell, author of Photography in America and Empire of Ruins Sandy Sorlien's Inland represents a haunting journey through a critical waterway of Pennsylvania and the now-ruined stone architecture that gave shape to its flow. Her work documents, in water and stone, both an economic and environmental legacy of our region. There could be nothing more important today than to embrace and rebuild the relationship between human activity and the precious, life-giving resource of water. --William R. Valerio, Ph.D., Director and CEO of the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia
