For more than thirty years Richard Brown has been taking photographs of his beloved home state. Now, in this ode to the land and its people, he brings together his favorite images to share his own deeply personal vision of Vermont.

Richard Brown's Vermont has six seasons, not four. The familiar glory of fall foliage, when the hills are giddy with color, gives way to the austere "offseason," that brief November transition before the snow flies, when the bones of the landscape are revealed in fallow fields and the bare limbs of trees. In deepest winter the ubiquity of snow renders even more vivid those few colors that remain-the cobalt blue of a shadow on snow, the warm red of a barn. "Mud and Maple" celebrates both the convivial season of flowing sap and the perennial challenges of impassable dirt roads. In spring lambs frolic in greened-up pastures, and all-too-fleeting summer months bring a burst of industry to gardens and fields before September's frost.

Throughout the seasons, Brown's soulful images create a distinctive photographic portrait of Vermont's landscape and its people. He chronicles with great affection the people who live and work on the land, and without sentiment celebrates a rapidly disappearing way of life.

"Mr. Brown is my favorite upcountry artist with a camera. His photographs have such crisp luminosity I think I would recognize them anywhere. Uniquely, he captures the quality of northern light, whether it's the beatification of a curly Dorset sheep or the stunning blow of sunlight hammering the east face of a snowed-in farmhouse."
—Maxine Kumin, The New York Times Book Review

"The beauty of Richard Brown's photos makes us think about what we are doing to our state. His is an important vision: much of Vermont is still beautiful, but we need to see and appreciate the ideal if we are to preserve it. And Richard's photography expresses that ideal superlatively well."
—Tom Slayton, Vermont Life Magazine

$24.95 (Can. $35.00)
0-88150-677-X
10 1/2 x 8 3/4 , 144 pages, paperback, 120 color photographs