Isabella
Shortly after the new year began, we went back in time with a visit to the Isabella Steward Gardener Museum.
Founded by Bostonian art collector and patron Isabella Steward Gardner in 1900, the museum operates under a mandate by Gardener that her collection be open to the public according to her "aesthetic vision and intent." The museum is housed in a villa she fashioned after a fifteenth century Venetian palace that wraps around a central courtyard. The notorious lighting varies from flooding skylights to dim interior rooms in a nod to authenticity and a bow to conservation concerns.
With an old twin lens reflex camera and slow Kodak Portra 160 film, I photographed select spaces that felt especially charged in their interplay of her objets d'art and the day's winter light.
