Description: A rare photographic river trip revealing the once-famous but now-hidden industrial landscapes of Pennsylvania that helped shape the nation.
Brief description: Sandy Sorlien is the author of 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.
Review Quotes: "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