In a 90-minute sit-down, Michael Kolster and Matthew Klingle first wax philosophic — how much is a place affected by someone and how much is someone affected by a place? — veer to the poetic — it’s about appreciating the here — then offer analogies to the hanging gardens of Babylon.

All talking about the Androscoggin River.

That Androscoggin.

The Bowdoin College professors have studied and photographed the river for two years and counting. They want others to look.

Really look.

“The Androscoggin is a complicated place,” said Klingle, an associate professor in the department of history.

The river runs behind Kolster’s studio in Brunswick’s Fort Andross mill. Since May he’s been taking photos using glass plates and pre-Civil War-era technology for a result that looks like the river went to a photo booth, dressed up in centuries-old costume and smiled.

Tones are almost sepia and the edges distorted, as though yanked from a fire at the last minute.

“It’s exciting for me as a historian to look at Mike’s plates,” said Klingle. “They mess with time and space in such an exciting way.”

There’s a slight rattle to Kolster’s workshop — tink, tink, tink, tink — as the 200 glass plates,  called ambrotypes, shudder in their racks with every footstep. He’s also taken digital shots and used film, in color and black and white.

“The best part of photographing the river for me is I’m never going to know it or understand it,” said Kolster, an associate professor in the art department.

Klingle has collected oral histories related to the Androscoggin from Bates College’s Muskie Archives. Together they’ve added new oral histories to those and Klingle’s done some narrative writing.

They’re hoping the material becomes a book and website and, potentially, a traveling exhibit.

“My hope is that people begin to understand the Androscoggin River as the birthplace of the Clean Water Act. It stands for and can be thought of as a lot of other rivers around the country,” Kolster said.

The working title of their effort: “A River Lost and Found: The Androscoggin River in Time and Place.”

They’ll speak Monday at 7:30 p.m. in the Bates’ archives, part of the Harward Center’s Civic Forum Series, free and open to the public.

Klingle, originally from Utah, and Kolster, who moved to Maine 10 years ago from San Francisco, aren’t coming from a place of nostalgia, nor are they on an ecological mission.

The project is part academic, part hyper-aware.

“Most of the world is like the Androscoggin,” said Klingle.

Imperfect.

“A lot of environmental thinking makes it easy to love places you put up in a calendar,” he said. The reality of “The Great Nearby” is less romantic.

There’s no doubt the river was over-used by industry in the past, Klingle said. In more recent decades, it’s been ignored, something they see firsthand fishing the Androscoggin in kickboats.

“Sections of it you can float for hours and not spot a house,” said Kolster.

People built homes and included a buffer between themselves and the river.

When they fish locally, the pair put in behind Gritty’s in Auburn. Klingle said it’s striking how few people they run into on the water.

“Occasionally, they look down (from bridges) with curiosity. One kid threw a beer can at us. In the middle of town, no one is really looking out at the river,” he said. “If this was more like the Connecticut River or the Hudson River, my god, we’d be seeing mansions and helipads and who knows what else.”

For their project, they’re hoping to collect more oral histories, from people who worked in paper mills or managed them, people who fish the Androscoggin, people who grew up beside it. They needn’t have big, sweeping statements, Klingle said. Just memories.

The project may eventually include a comparison of the Androscoggin with the James River in Virginia. Kolster goes down at the end of the month to start shooting.

The James was polluted and it’s coming back, Klingle said. Beyond that, hundreds of years ago, “These two river systems were chosen as some of the initial attempts to settle the New World.”

They’d like people to not just enjoy the Androscoggin, but experience it. Reflect. See where it’s going, where it’s been.

“The world is so amazingly generous,” Kolster said. “How do we figure out ways we can engage with it fully?”

kskelton@sunjournal.com

Where’s the forum; where are the pictures?

Bowdoin College faculty members Michael Kolster, a photographer, and Matthew Klingle, a historian and environmentalist, explore the Androscoggin River’s past, present and future in a presentation at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 17, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Civic Forum events are free and open to the public. For more information, call 786-6202.

Kolster and Klingle’s project, “A River Lost and Found: The Androscoggin River in Time and Place,” uses photography, oral history, archival research and creative nonfiction writing to examine the hidden past and neglected present of the river.

“We will ask how an injured river might reveal an ethic of place that embraces the complexities of human and natural history together,” Klingle and Kolster state in their project description. “Our answers may suggest how Americans can embrace the middle ground between the pristine and the ruined (that is) typical of the places many call home.”

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