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Act of Faith: Beverly Hall’s Nantucket
by Kate Stout for Nantucket Magazine, Summer 2005
It’s a foggy day on Nantucket, Beverly Hall’s favorite kind. She prefers these moody, mysterious days for her images. The overcast gives a richness to the contrast she loves in black-and-white photography and, more practically, helps her portrait subjects avoid squinting. But the fog suits her in other, more personal ways. A cat lover and a quotation lover, she relishes the Sandburg line “The fog comes in on little cat feet.”
A foggy Nantucket day is also emblematic of her spiritual quest.
“I love change and I don’t like change,” she reflects, “that is my paradox.” Fog, of course, makes you look anew at the familiar and, as T.S. Eliot says, “know the place for the first time."
On this particular day, Beverly comes away from a walk on the beach along Madaket harbor laden with stones. She collects stones, from the smallest lucky stone (one with a white ring around it), to the carefully placed stones that form her two-circle garden labyrinth, to the Indian prayer rock from Dionis that is the centerpiece of her desert garden. Indeed, stones figure in all four of her garden areas. It’s as if the stones are counterweights to the fog, the solid earthbound balancing
the ethereal, fluid, airy shroud. |
Kate Stout and Beverly Hall have been friends since 1976
and have put word and image together many times. |
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