Southworth travels to Maine whenever possible, always imagining being able to inhabit the Stonington area for a long, unbroken time. She walks the woods and kayaks among the islands searching for subjects that stop her in her tracks. Primarily working in the panoramic format, she is adept at finding subtle compositions held together by tenuous threads of color, such as the red leaves of blueberry bushes winding into a forest, or the verdant moss clinging to a rocky ledge stretching away from the camera.
Southworth uses a Fuji 6 x 17 cm panoramic camera. She scans the transparency on a Topaz flat bed scanner, and uses the computer to adjust the image for Iris printing, which she does using an Iris Graphics 3047 printer. As a photographer and a printmaker, her goal is “to communicate as truly as, and as much as is visually possible, the whole experience, the ineffable sense, of connecting to a place.”