Amani Willett: The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer
May 1st – June 28th, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, May 1st, 5-8pm
Artists Statement
Searching for a place to be at peace in the wilderness, my dad bought seven acres of undeveloped land in central New Hampshire in the late 1970s.
It wasn’t until 2010 that I became curious about the story of a man named Joseph Plummer, who we were told lived in the same woods during the late 1700s and 1800s. It was said this local legend left his town of a mere 100 people to be in seclusion.
Researching and finding very little concrete information about Joseph has paradoxically heightened his presence in my mind and inspired me to seek out what drove him from his life. I uncovered some of his personal belongings and spent summers tracking down the places where he spent his days. Interviews with local residents told of his hostility to “loafers and spendthrifts” and his “mortal opposition to progress, generally.” But the scant information about Joseph only inspires more questions and feeds his local mythology.
I believe the story of Joseph Plummer parallels my dad’s and now my desire to disappear into the landscape of central New Hampshire. Joseph’s world is an unabashedly romantic view of nature and its sublime power, yet his life and the landscape he inhabited exude the mystery of the unknowable.
My dad and I often take long walks in the New Hampshire woods, usually ending up searching for where the hermit lived. While we’ve been to the site of his long-gone home many times, we somehow always get lost along the way – and getting lost seems to be the point. In our modern world when it can be difficult to disconnect, following Joseph’s path into the woods offers a welcome respite.
About the Artist
Amani Willett is a Brooklyn and Boston-based photographer whose practice is driven by conceptual ideas surrounding family, history, memory, and the social environment. Working primarily with the book form, his three monographs have been published to widespread critical acclaim. Disquiet (Damiani, 2013) and The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer (Overlapse, 2017) and “A Parallel Road (Overlapse 2020)” were selected by Photo-Eye as “best books” of the year and have been highlighted in over 70 publications including Photograph Magazine, PDN, Hyperallergic, Lensculture, New York Magazine, 1000 Words, NPR, The British Journal of Photography, Collector Daily and Buzzfeed and recommended by Todd Hido, Elisabeth Biondi (former Visuals Editor of The New Yorker), Vince Aletti and Joerg Colberg (Conscientious), among others.
Amani’s photographs are also featured in the books American Geography (SF Moma/Radius Books, 2021), Bystander: A History of Street Photography (2017 edition, Laurence King Publishing), Street Photography Now (Thames and Hudson), New York: In Color (Abrams), and have been published widely in places including The Atlantic, American Photography, Newsweek, Harper’s, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review of Books. His work resides in the collections of the Tate Modern, The Library of the Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Sir Elton John Photography Collection, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Oxford University, and Harvard University, among others.
Amani completed an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, NY in 2012 and a BA from Wesleyan University in 1997.
In addition to his artistic practice, Amani is an Assistant Professor of Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.