From a Summer Notebook

“Here are pages from a photographer’s summer notebook, the sights he wishes to remember, the feelings he wishes
to record… These pages from my notebook encompass that same time, those same places, seen through a different
eye, recorded in a different language…” Ruth Bains Hartmann
So begins From a Summer Notebook which combines the photos of Magnum photojournalist Erich Hartmann with the
words of his writer wife Ruth Bains Hartmann. This book is a record of a shared summer holiday in coastal Maine, not
an album of incidents but a distillation of a particular time and place through images and words. Long married, much
travelled, often separated by work, but together here in the same place during a calm interval of privacy, photographer
and writer reveal separate realities and parallel memories that together form one statement. Photographs of their family
summerhouse and the quiet Maine countryside through which they roam without plan or destination are not described
but enhanced by the writer’s memories of past summers, and perhaps of time itself. Both separate and personal, these
images and words are a quiet celebration of a fondly remembered summer.