(gentle music) - The fact that this is the bicentennial really underscores, to me, just this sense of time and place and the interconnectedness of us living on the canal with the people that built it 200 years ago.

It really puts us on the continuum of canal communities.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) - The Erie Canal Artist-in-Residence program is a collaboration between the Erie Canal Museum and the New York State Canal Corporation.

The Erie Canal Museum and the Canal Corporation have been in an active partnership really since 2021, with the express purpose of looking for new ways to tell and talk about the Erie Canal.

The first year of the program had just one artist, and then the second year we chose to broaden it to have three artists.

So we have Clara Riedlinger, Alon Koppel, and Judit German-Heins.

- I grew up here in Rochester, and my family are from the Finger Lakes region and have lived here for a really long time, so I've always felt pretty attached to this landscape.

When I was in college, I took a class on landscape cinematography, and it got me really interested in how narratives are expressed through landscape.

I just started thinking that there was this real strangeness to the simultaneous artificiality of the canal, and the natural environment sort of folding in on one another.

It just seemed like that was the key to this history, particularly the religious and spiritual and political history of Western New York.

I'm hoping that people look at my images and can get a sense of that transcendence, especially the process of going out and photographing these spaces where major spiritual events occurred.

I really wanna put myself in the mindset of somebody who might have experienced that kind of spiritual ecstasy.

(gentle music) - So the tintype, the process is basically, I'm creating my own film.

It was discovered in the 1850s, so with that, it carries kind of a historical look with this black and white process, and I was captivated from day one, so I wanted to learn it.

Since then, I'm using the process to compare current social and political issues with history.

I was fortunate enough to work with the Canal Corporation, so I had a list of women who were working for the canals, and also women who didn't work directly with the canal, but they were associated with their work.

Women were very excited, many women members saying that, you know, it's really cool, because we have 50 men in the office and there's four of us are women, so they kind of thought that his project was very important for them.

The main point that I would like people to think about one day looking at my images is the road that we traveled from the Women's Rights Movement.

When you look at those portraits, and the women who are filling jobs that, in the 19th century, were not heard of, or couldn't even think about filling with a woman.

Now we are here, and we traveled a long ways from the women rights movements, but we are still have a long, long road in front of us to gender equality.

(gentle music) - For me, photography is about slowing down, and also showing people a slightly different angle of things, and having them think about a little bit more.

What do we lose when we took those canals out, and how can we not lose that again in other projects?

I like to show how things change.

My photography is always time-based, and by that, I mean I usually have my camera on a tripod, and by having it on a tripod, I can then control time in a very obvious way that I can do long exposures, and I can set up the camera in a way that I can repeat that location again in certain places.

When I applied for the residency, I thought that I'm sure the economic museum will have a bunch of old historical photos, content that I can work with, so that really got me excited about it.

The original photos were made around 1899, 1900, and I'm rematching that now.

Each photo that I reshoot now takes about two hours to set up, find the right location, not even including the research that I have to do about that.

So it's a long and involved process, and sometime even after a couple hours, I'm giving up.

It's just not matching.

I don't know what they did exactly, but it's not matching.

But when it does match and I'm right there and everything clicks, I'm transported in time to that original photo.

(gentle music) I really felt that sometimes I'm on the banks of the canal, so I'm a little bit transported in time.

I think all the three projects are very different.

The three of us, we now have seen each other's work and process through Zoom.

I would not be able to do what they did, and I think vice versa.

Each person has done a very different take on the Erie Canal and a different location.

It will come together, I think, in a very interesting way once it's organically all placed together.

(gentle music) - All of our work was around the history.

We're connected in some ways with the history of the Erie Canal.

- As we reflect back on 200 years, I think it's just natural to think about in 200 years what are people going to be saying about us, and I'm hopeful that in 200 years when people look back, they'll look back at 2025 as a year where the canal really broadened that story and started talking about those things that make us very uncomfortable, and so how do we have this manmade body of water that has kind of naturalized itself in this world that we live in?

How do we heal some of those past wounds while continuing to move forward together?

I'm hoping that collaboration and teamwork will kind of bring us all together in a way that is positive as we move forward.

(audience applauds) (gentle music)