Penobscot Marine Museum Photography Exhibits at the University of Maine Hutchinson Center
Belfast, Maine — Penobscot Marine Museum’s historic photography exhibits “Through Her Lens – Women Photographers of Midcoast Maine, 1885 – 1925” and “Evolution of the Photographic Snapshot:1888-2015” will be at the University of Maine Hutchinson Center Fernald Gallery, through September 2.
The exhibit in the H. Alan and Sally Fernald Art Gallery is free and open to the public, 8 a.m.-7 p.m. weekdays.
“Through Her Lens” represents a period when the medium of photography highlights a period of great social change in Europe and the United States.
A handful of women began opening daguerreotype studios in Europe and the U.S. as early 1843, and were among the first professionals in this technical field. This occurred at a time when most women who worked outside the home were employed as domestic servants, schoolteachers, nurses, or laborers in the textile industry.
The exhibit photographs, drawn from the Penobscot Marine Museum’s permanent collections and from loans, represent the work of five women photographers, all born in the latter half of the 19th century and based between Boothbay and Blue Hill. Some travelled the world with their seafaring fathers or well-to-do husbands; others never strayed far from their origins. Some were amateurs with varying skills; others transformed their talents into income. This exhibit explores the multitude of ways women mediated—through the lens of the camera—shifting roles in public and domestic life during a time of great social change in Maine and the nation. Women incorporated camera work into their daily lives as artists, amateurs, preservationists, professionals, and as travelers and explorers, while photography altered the way men, women and children saw the world, themselves and each other.
“Evolution of the Photographic Snapshot” explores the snapshot as a self-portrait of our culture. In the 1800s cameras were expensive and photography was the work of professionals, but when Eastman Kodak introduced the inexpensive Brownie camera in 1900, suddenly everyone had a camera. What do we photograph and why, and what do the snapshots we take tell us about ourselves? This exhibit was guest curated by retired Beloit College professor and Swanville resident Michael Simon.
For more information or to request a disability accommodation, contact Nancy Bergerson, 207.338.8049. Additional information about the Hutchinson Center is online (hutchinsoncenter.umaine.edu).
About the University of Maine:
The University of Maine, founded in Orono in 1865, is the state’s only public research university. It celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2015. UMaine is among the most comprehensive higher education institutions in the Northeast and attracts students from Maine and 45 other states, and 65 countries. It currently enrolls 10,922 total undergraduate and graduate students who can directly participate in groundbreaking research working with world-class scholars. The University of Maine offers doctoral degrees in 35 fields, representing the humanities, sciences, engineering and education; master’s degrees in nearly 70 disciplines; 90 undergraduate majors and academic programs; and one of the oldest and most prestigious honors programs in the U.S. The university promotes environmental stewardship, with substantial efforts campuswide aimed at conserving energy, recycling and adhering to green building standards in new construction. For more information about UMaine, visit umaine.edu.