December 13, 2008 – March 15, 2009

This exhibition features 40 exceptional museum-quality color photographic prints (using a new “archival pigment” process) by naturalist, photographer and writer William Burt.

After 30 years of prowling marshes with large-format cameras, Burt has assembled this exhibition full of treasure and surprise, much like the marsh itself. It offers glimpses of a world we seldom wander and of elusive creatures most of us will never see. Art and nature lovers of all kinds and ages will explore it with wide eyes.

William Burt’s stories and photographs are seen in Smithsonian, Audubon, National Wildlife and other magazines, and he is the author of two distinguished books on birds: Shadowbirds (1994) and Rare & Elusive Birds of North America (2001). The newest book by Mr. Burt, also titled Marshes:The Disappearing Edens, is the basis for this exhibition.

Burt stated, “I’ve always been drawn to marshes because they are such mysterious and concealing places with this lure of the forbidden and the out of bounds, like the prohibited frontier out there beyond a little boy’s back yard. They await, just begging exploration. No other space on earth packs in so many birds per acre — and strange, elusive, tantalizing birds, such as the slinking rails and bitterns, busy-body wrens, shy sparrows, and a whole circus of aquatic kinds that honk and hoot and quack and splash and dabble, dive and sink like submarines.”

Burt added, “Then there is the wild and pristine beauty. No place has the wildness, any more, of the neglected marsh — nor to this eye has the beauty.”

Watch Comcast Newsmakers five-minute segment (YouTube) click here

The Reading Public Museum is supported in part by grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.