mississippi: book of hours

by Linda Gammell

Linda Gammell’s Mississippi: Book of Hours is a series of photographs of the river taken over the course of a decade. Each work from the series chronicles one day in the year from a bird’s eye view. Her notation system, 132/365, indicates which day the images were taken (in this case, May 12) and evokes the project’s goal of capturing a fragment of time. A Book of Hours, referenced in the project’s title, was a personal Christian prayer book of daily devotions that was popular in the Middle Ages. The artist has explained that, like a Medieval Book of Hours, this project is a “personal sacred way of marking deep time.” Gammell’s photographs evoke this sacred source material by including two poetic and contemplative images in each print, placed side-by-side like pages in an open book. Together, they seem full of potential and mystery, with dark, looming trees on the shoreline that lead to diverging paths in the water.