Book Review by Norman Fine
Bound to the Country: 30 Years of Photographing Mr. Stewart’s Cheshire Foxhounds, photographs and text by Jim Graham, Brilliant Graphics, 2020, hardbound, 10-1/4 x 12-1/2, color, casebound, cloth, 100lb matte fine art paper, 196 pages with a gatefold, duotone and four-color with 400 line hybrid screening, $75.00 Click here for a video preview; click here to purchase.
This long-awaited, lushly-produced, oversized book of photographic art, Bound to the Country: 30 Years of Photographing Mr. Stewart’s Cheshire Foxhounds by Jim Graham, is available for purchase.
This is not just a book about the Cheshire, and it is not just a book about Chester County’s pretty landscape. It is a magnificent work of the photographer’s art. It is a book inspired by a unique sporting community precariously situated between the suburbs of Wilmington and Philadelphia. For more than a hundred years this community has been zealously preserved by people of character who desired to live out their own vision of family life, a vision not left to the local Board of Commerce. You must see Jim Graham’s portraiture of these individuals. The images stun me. Character and soul are not easily captured in photographs.
The late Nancy Penn Smith Hannum, former MFH and huntsman, Mr. Stewart’s Cheshire Foxhounds / Photograph by Jim Graham
“So many people come out to the country because they think they want to be in the country. But, you know, they aren’t very authentic. The country has a way of finding its way into you. Eventually you can start to see it in a person’s eyes and in their face. Then you know they are authentic. And then you know they are bound to the country.”
—Nancy Penn Smith Hannum
Oscar John “Monk” Crosson, Jr., whipper-in / Photograph by Jim Graham
For thirty years photographer Jim Graham has followed Mr. Stewart’s Cheshire Foxhounds (PA) through the hunt’s Unionville, Pennsylvania countryside, land that has remained much as it was since the early twentieth century. Through the efforts of the Brandywine Conservancy, Masters and members of the Cheshire Hunt throughout its long history, and many land owners, the land continues to remain open and bucolic much as it was when W. Plunkett Stewart, MFH, discovered it, established his hunt, pioneered the concept of open space preservation, and eventually bequeathed his hunt, his horn, and his passion for the land to his step-daughter, Nancy Hannum.
Hound in the country / Photograph by Jim Graham
Mrs. Hannum was Jim Graham’s inspiration and mentor for these past thirty years. The quoted text in two paragraphs that follow are from The Lady Blows a Horn by Nancy L. Mohr, Horse Country Press, 1997.
“A granddaughter of Edward Henry Harriman—Wall Street baron, railroad magnate and founder of the Orange County Hunt (VA)—Mrs. Hannum possessed an unswerving fixity of purpose. She served as Master of the Cheshire for over fifty years, and as huntsman for much of that time. Through those years she guarded the open space of Chester County [as her step-father’s disciple.] She “advised” property owners how (and how not) to fence their land; she “convinced” them where to site their houses and improvements; she purchased countless properties and resold them at cost to sympathetic buyers; and she battled developers by every possible means from persuasion to bureaucratic delay. Moreover, she recruited the residents of her hunting community to follow her lead. Born of a bygone era, Nancy Hannum was one of the great heroines for the preservation of open space in what was then and now a fast-moving constriction of urban America.”
Mrs. Hannum’s congenital trait—her aptitude for conviction—was so deeply rooted in her mother’s, the Harriman side of her family, that the even the children could recite:
“In controversial moments
My perception’s very fine;
I always see both points of view,
The one that’s wrong and mine.”
Huntsman Ivan Dowling, hounds, staff, and field hunting in the snow / Photograph by Jim Graham
Jim Graham is an American photojournalist and commercial photographer who documents the human condition and current events. He is well known for his equestrian field work and has covered Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Maryland steeplechase and timber racing for forty years. Graham’s work has been shown internationally, and he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for news photography.
F. Bruce Miller, MFH, (right) with Chris Gracie. Miller trained Gracie, who, in 2006, went on to be the youngest rider ever to win the Maryland Hunt Cup.
In 1994 Jim went to the Vicmead Hunt Club in Centreville, Delaware to take riding lessons. He’d ridden a few times before, but not seriously, and he admittedly didn’t know what he was doing on the back of a horse. At Vicmead he learned to walk, trot, canter, and even gallop. He even made it over a few fences. After some time and many lessons, Graham’s instructor, an accomplished show jumper, quizzed him about his interest. “You don’t own a horse, you really don’t come from an equestrian family, what are you doing here?” she asked. “Well, I do like galloping and jumping the fences,” he responded. “Oh my lord,” she said, “you’re a damned foxhunter.” It turned out, she really wasn’t wrong.
One hunting day Mrs. Hannum saw him with his camera and asked her grand-daughter, Curtis, if he was taking pictures of the country. “No,” said Curtis, “he’s taking pictures of you.” “Oh,” said Mrs. Hannum, “I thought he was photographing the country…” “Well,” said Curtis, “he is, Gran. He is photographing the country.”
Along with his book, Jim Graham has also released a series of six select Giclée prints from Bound to the Country—gorgeous images that come straight from the eye of this gifted photographer who has documented this hunt for a generation. The prints artfully illustrate the symbiotic relationship between the people, the hunt, and their surrounding landscape. The print of your choosing will be hand made on fine art archival paper.
Jim Graham’s new book of photographic art invokes the hunting field and its passionate followers like no other—a coffee table book with a message, to grace any home and speak to the sensibilities of whoever opens it.
Click here for a video preview of Bound to the Country; click here to purchase.
Posted November 18, 2020
Foxhound in kennel / Photograph by Jim Graham