Jenny Riffle’s photographs of the Butternut Valley will be featured in an exhibition opening Friday, Oct. 2, at The Gatehouse, 129 Main St. in Morris. The opening event runs from 4 to 6 p.m. (Photo by Jenny Riffle)

MORRIS — A place begins to reveal itself when we slow down enough to look.

The bend in a road. The shape of a hillside. A field opening into the woods. Water moving through a creek. Morning light settling across the valley.

For the people who live here, these are familiar things. They are part of everyday life — and part of what makes the Butternut Valley feel like home.

This fall, The Gatehouse invites visitors to spend a little time looking at that familiar landscape through another set of eyes.

On Friday, Oct. 2, from 4 to 6 p.m., The Gatehouse will open “Butternut Valley: Photographs by Jenny Riffle,” an exhibition celebrating the valley through the photographs of artist and photographer Jenny Riffle.

Three years ago, Riffle moved to downtown Morris. Since then, she has been getting to know the Butternut Valley not as a visitor passing through, but as someone making a life here.

She has wandered its roads, spent time among its forests and fields, watched the seasons change and paid attention to the quieter corners of the landscape. Her photographs come from that attention: a way of looking closely at the place around her and allowing it to reveal itself over time.

There is a particular kind of attention that comes from being an artist. It asks us to linger, to look again and to notice what might otherwise pass by.

There is something special in seeing a familiar place through another person's eyes: a hillside we have driven past, a stretch of woods we know by season, a road we have traveled a hundred times, or a particular quality of light that lasts only a few minutes.

And for those discovering the valley for the first time, the photographs offer another kind of invitation: to come see the place for yourself.

In Morris, the landscape is never far from the village. It is there beyond Main Street, along the roads that wind outward, and in the hills, farms, forests and waterways that surround us.

About Jenny Riffle

Jenny Riffle (born in 1979 in Mount Vernon, Washington) is an artist and photographer based in New York. She received her bachelor’s degree in photography from Bard College in 2001 and her master’s degree in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2011. Working primarily with narrative portraiture and landscapes, Riffle explores the psychological essence of a person or place.

Her work has been exhibited internationally and has appeared in Wired, Time Lightbox, The Independent, The Guardian, The New York Times, Telegraph Magazine, M Le magazine du Monde, Glamour and Vice. She is the author of the collaborative self-portrait book “It’s Raining… I Love You” (Minor Matters Books, 2020) and the monograph “Scavenger: Adventures in Treasure Hunting” (Zatara Press, 2015).

Riffle’s honors include Artist Trust’s GAP, FotoFilmic’s BMNF Award, the Pilkington Prize, PDN’s 30 and an Aaron Siskind Foundation Grant.

“Butternut Valley: Photographs by Jenny Riffle” opens Friday, Oct. 2, 2026, from 4 to 6 p.m. at The Gatehouse, 129 Main St., Morris, New York. The exhibition will remain on view at The Gatehouse following the opening.

Come for the photographs. Stay awhile. And take the long way home.

— Information from The Gatehouse