Penobscot Marine Museum Exhibits – Animal Tales and Lincoln County Through the Eastern Eye (April–June 2022)
Two Penobscot Marine Museum photography exhibits – “Lincoln County Through the Eastern Eye” and “Animal Tales” – are on display at the H. Allen and Sally Fernald Art Gallery at the University of Maine Hutchinson Center in Belfast through June 30. The show is free and open to the public, 8 a.m.–4:30 p.m., Monday–Friday.
“Animal Tales” uses photographs from the Penobscot Marine Museum’s extensive photography archives and the intriguing stories behind the images to explore the fascination people have with animals. Since the beginning of photography, people have enjoyed using their lens to forever capture beloved pets, livestock, wildlife, and fishing and hunting successes. The exhibit features a range of photographs from casual snapshots taken by amateur photographers, to carefully conceived photos taken by professional photographers like Kosti Ruohomaa. “Animal Tales” is sponsored by Sally Savage.
“Lincoln Country through the Eastern Eye” features photographs from towns, tiny communities and summer colonies. The majority of photos in this exhibit were taken between about 1910 and the 1920s when steamers and sloops plied coastal waters and threaded through bays and harbors, around islands and rocky peninsulas. These vessels carried passengers and freight, including inventory for the general stores that were centers of community life. They also brought summer people to the growing number of hotels, boarding houses, resorts and cottages. Local residents earned their living by fishing, tending store, or working in boatyards, seafood processing plants, or one of Lincoln County’s few manufacturing industries. New opportunities for work arose as tourism businesses multiplied. The images in the exhibit are a small sample of Eastern Illustrating and Publishing Company photographs that collectively tell a big story about life in Lincoln County a century ago. Outreach to local residents and community historians has yielded personal recollections, family connections and disappearing history, which have enriched the photo captions. Viewers whose memories are stirred as exhibits travel from town to town have opportunities to share that information with the Penobscot Marine Museum. The exhibit was researched and curated by Liz Fitzsimmons.
About the Penobscot Marine Museum
The Penobscot Marine Museum has one of the largest archives of historical photographs in Maine, with more than 140,000 negatives, prints, slides, postcards and daguerreotypes available for research, reproduction and licensing. Revealing many aspects of life from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the collections range from the vast archives of the Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Company and the works of individual professional photographers to intimate family albums. Each collection has a connection with the Penobscot Bay region, either through the photographer, the publisher or the subject matter. Along with images of Searsport and elsewhere in Maine and New England are photographs of distant lands; boats, ships and waterfronts; cities, towns and countryside; fashion, furnishings, industry, architecture and people.
Learn more about the Penobscot Marine Museum here.
Learn more about the H. Allen and Sally Fernald Art Gallery here.