Bill Franson | Dogtown

Bill Franson's Dogtown series started from an abiding interest in the physical residue of ideas impressed on the landscape. He was driven to explore what was left after the original intent for a space had diminished and it had succumbed to weather and nature’s relentless transformation and the eyes of later generations.

Dogtown has a rich history, the earliest as the original inland Gloucester settlement, later abandoned for the economic possibilities on the coast. During the Depression, the wealthy eccentric philanthropist Roger Babson created a Works Progress Administration project, hiring unemployed stone-masons to chisel his favorite words and inspirational phrases onto several dozen massive glacial moraine boulders, creating what he called his stone book.

Over time the stone littered open fields yielded to forest. The effect of walking through a densely wooded area and coming across a boulder with words like “Help Mother” or “Truth” can be quite startling, and though the phrases come across as openly honest and sentimental, found in the landscape they are strangely unsettling and intellectually provocative.