GLOUCESTER, MASS.- The Cape Ann Museum announced the opening of Green Places/Green Spaces/Greenhouses, an exhibition featuring panoramic color photographs by photographer Esther Pullman, a Cape Ann summer resident for 44 years.

In 1999, Pullman began photographing places where plants were cultivated—fields, nurseries and most of all greenhouses. The project began without an overt message in mind. However, in the nearly 20 years since then, it has revealed many themes and deeper meanings: the passage of time, the cycle of the seasons, death and rebirth. It has also become a metaphor for our threatened planet.

The panoramic color photographs shown in Green Places/Green Spaces/Greenhouses explore the distinctive architecture, light and atmosphere of greenhouses throughout the year. Each panorama consists of two to seven photographs, composed as much as possible as independent and autonomous images. When exhibited side by side, the result is a continuous composition. The greenhouses Pullman has captured include those that are in use today as well as those that have been shuttered, their gardening equipment and machinery left to decay. A number of the panoramas in the exhibit feature local Cape Ann structures.

A graduate of Smith College and Yale University, Pullman has worked as a graphic designer, a typographer and letterpress printer, and as a photographer. She has studied photography at Harvard Extension School, Maine Photographic Workshop, the Art Institute of Boston (now Lesley University) and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her first one-person photography exhibit was held at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, in 2006. She has been a summer resident of Cape Ann since 1975.

Cape Ann has long been recognized as one of this country’s oldest and most important art colonies and the collection of the Cape Ann Museum contains examples of works by many of the artists who put the community on the map including Marsden Hartley, Cecilia Beaux, Edward Hopper and John Sloan. At the heart of the Cape Ann Museum’s holdings is the single largest collection of works by early 19th century artist Fitz Henry Lane (1804-1865). A native of Gloucester, Lane worked as a lithographer and a painter and his works on display at the Cape Ann Museum capture the town’s busy seaport in its heyday.