A dinghy by any other name

Photo by Nancy Rich

Though she lives on the landlocked campus of the Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Nancy Rich returns often to the Atlantic to pursue her photographic muse. Rich, the Academic Dean at Dana Hall, is exhibiting her photos at the school through Tuesday, December 8, and she will travel to the Hingham Public Library on Monday, December 7 to talk about her new book, to talk about her new book, “Afloat on the Tide,” which includes a short story by noted maritime author Peter H. Spectre.

In an interview with the Globe, Rich talked about her book and her love of wooden boats.

My sister-in-law and brother-in-law live on North Haven, Maine, which is a small island. It's gorgeous there, and there are lots of beautiful wooden boats. I’ve always loved photography since I was young child, and for three summers, starting in 2000, I took the Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport. There are lots of beautiful wooden dinghies in towns like Rockport and Camden, and the water is just so peaceful, and the boats so beautiful.

I literally have thousands of pictures of boats, and a lot are duplicates. I go back year after year in different lighting and it's like looking at old friends -- you see them age and become more beautiful in some ways.

I took the 200 photos in the book over about 10 years. About half of them are on film and half on digital files. There are some from as far north as the Canadian Maritimes, St. Andrews, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick. And there are a lot of pictures from Maine, lots from Massachusetts, and some from Rhode Island.

I have some nice boats from Cohasset, Scituate, and Hingham. It’s funny, I think of Cohasset as such a well-to-do town, and of some of the most broken-down boats in the book are from Cohasset, but they’re beautiful.

I also take photos of boats that aren’t made of wood, but Peter [Spectre] is very knowledgeable about wooden boats, as a lot of people are, so we decided to pull out all the synthetic boats from the book and include just wooden boats.

I’m not a boater myself, and one of the things I wanted Peter to do is to define for me all the different kinds of small wooden boats. I have a self-published book called “The Noble Dinghy,” but I knew that about half of the pictures in that book were actually dinghies. They all looked very similar, but there are skiffs, prams, tenders, dinghies, rowboats -- It’s remarkable how many boats look very much the same, but have something slightly different and have a totally different name.

I took the photos to capture beautiful images, and also to preserve a photographic record of the boats. There’s a place called Sorrento, Maine, for example -- an absolutely stunning harbor. Ten years ago, if there were 35 boats there, you would probably see seven or eight wooden boats. Now you’ll go and see just one or two.

Wooden boats just aren’t being replaced. Some are in pretty tough shape. They look very old; the salt, the sun, and the use wears on them like people, though sometimes the ones that look the worst are the ones that look most attractive to the camera. Other boats are absolutely stunning and have been well cared for, and just stay in great shape.

Wooden boats take a lot of TLC, a lot of resources, so people replace them with aluminum boats, and fiberglass boats, and rubber boats. But a wooden boat is just a classic, beautiful, artistic thing to behold.

Nancy Rich will appear at the Hingham Public Library Monday Dec. 7 at 7 p.m. to talk about “Afloat on the Tide.” She currently has a photography exhibit at Dana Hall School in Wellesley where there will a closing reception on Tuesday, 12/8, 5:00 – 7:30 p.m. She willl also appear the Framingham Barnes & Noble on Jan. 13.