James B. Abbott’s “On the River’s Edge: The Disintegrating Touch of Nature”

Join us for resident artist and photographer James B. Abbott’s On the River’s Edge: The Disintegrating Touch of Nature running August 6 through August 30, an exhibition of new color works exploring the forgotten, hidden, and decaying remnants of the post-industrial Delaware River Waterfront. Free and open to the public.

In this exhibition, Abbott visits sites that contain remnants of the city’s industrial past which are slowly being reclaimed by nature. At one site, in particular, Abbott revisited his own past at Pier 124 the former Conrail coal and iron ore loading pier, which he photographed in 1986 for Conrail when it was a fully operational pier.

The large color photographs include images made on both sides of the Delaware River from the Ben Franklin Bridge to the Philadelphia Naval Yard. His vocabulary is chosen to reflect both permanence and mutability and the highly transitory human intervention imprinting the environment.

This is another of Abbott’s ongoing, long-term projects about a place that he investigates in different seasons, times of day, weather, and tides. He seeks to create photographs that are densely layered, idiosyncratic, personal, visual interpretations that inform collective memory through investigating dichotomies and juxtapositions of old and new; iconic and mundane; enduring and changing.

About James B. Abbott
James B. Abbott arrived in Philadelphia in 1981 where he began photographing the Ben Franklin Bridge and surrounding neighborhoods along the Delaware River, and for over a thirty-five-year period produced different bodies of work on the Ben Franklin Bridge and its neighborhood. He also went on to other long-term urban and landscape projects in Berlin, the Cape Cod National Seashore, Florence, and Venice. A graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI, Abbott has received numerous grants, awards, residencies, and commissions while maintaining a freelance photography practice.

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Review our parking and directions information before your next visit.

Delaware River Trail Construction: Construction for the exciting Delaware River Trail is happening along Columbus Boulevard. The project is making headway and will result in a stunning multi-use trail that will increase accessibility to the Waterfront. The trail is scheduled for completion in Fall 2021.