voc 2020 episode 18: David Harp

Dave Harp and a lifetime of images. (Photo: Barbara Harp)

Chesapeake Bay Photographer, Author, & Outdoorsman

This interview was recorded on December 8, 2020 to help promote Dave Harp’s retrospective Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum exhibition, “Where Land and Water Meet: The Chesapeake Bay Photography of David Harp” (through September 20, 2021).

A lifelong Marylander, Dave Harp operates a corporate and editorial photography business in Cambridge, MD.  He is a 1969 graduate of Ohio University, with a degree in English literature.  He served as the staff photographer for the Hagerstown Morning Herald and was the photographer for The Baltimore Sun Magazine for nearly a decade before establishing his own business in 1990. 

Harp’s magazine work has taken him from the coast of Normandy for a story on the 40th anniversary of D-Day to western Australia for coverage of the America’s Cup. His magazine credits include The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Audubon, Sierra, Natural History, and Coastal Living Magazine. 

Harp teamed up with environmental writer Tom Horton for the children’s book, Swanfall, (1991).  His book, Water’s Way: Life Along the Chesapeake, a book of photographs with essays by Horton, was published by Elliott and Clark in 1992 and released as a paperback by The Johns Hopkins University Press in the spring of 2000.  He then produced a book of photographs – also with essays by Tom Horton – about journeys by canoe, kayak, and skiff into a Chesapeake Bay wetland and about the variety of life encountered there.  Called The Great Marsh: An Intimate Journey into a Chesapeake Wetland, it was published by The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2002.  His latest collaboration with Horton is The Nanticoke:  Portrait of a Chesapeake River (Johns Hopkins University Press 2008).  An exhibit of his photographs and audio visual shows depicting the Chesapeake Bay islands that will be affected by climate change opened at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in 2010.  

Daviid Harp was awarded the Andrew White Medal by Loyola College for his Chesapeake Bay photography in 2004, is a past president of the American Society of Media Photographers, and was appointed by Governor O’Malley to the Maryland State Arts Council.