Our Town
Our Town: Love, Joy, Sadness, And Baseball — 100 Years Of Photography From The Sheldon Museum
Early Photography in Middlebury
Photography arrived in Middlebury shortly after the medium was patented in Europe in 1839. Already in 1843 local newspapers and merchant registries noted the presence of daguerreian photographers in town.
Middlebury newspapers began to regularly run advertisements for itinerant photographers who established in town their temporary studios, called “daguerreian galleries.” In June 1843, Messrs. Whitmore & Porter placed an ad in The Middlebury Mercury to “inform citizens of Middlebury” that they have “taken rooms and set up their apparatus for taking daguerreotype miniatures” under the heading “Pencil of Nature.”
In subsequent advertisements, other daguerreian artists vowed to “secure the shadow” and even to “alter imperfect likeness” of the photographed subjects. At various times between 1843 and 1900, over thirty different photographers established their studios in Middlebury.
The Stewart-Swift Research Center houses over twenty thousand photographs that document Middlebury and Central Vermont. Among them are several hundred cased photographs, such as daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes.
These earliest photographic formats, dating from the early 1840s, were usually presented in decorative cases, reminiscent of painted miniatures. Despite the passage of time, the quality of these images is still vivid and full of detail. They hold the earliest likenesses of Middlebury residents and the town. The identity of some subjects has been unfortunately lost but the faces of these early citizens are as fresh as if their portraits were taken yesterday.
Daguerreotype, c. 1840s-c.1855, positive image on highly polished silver-coated copper plate with mirror-like reflection
Ambrotype, 1855- c. 1865, negative image on glass mounted against dark background to be viewed as positive
Tintype, c. 1860s -1900s, negative image on thin iron plate viewed as positive due to undercoating of black Japan varnish; inexpensive, popularized during the Civil War period
Collection Images
Click on the photos for more information!
Statement by Curator James P. Blair
What an adventure this has been!
I have been a photographer for the National Geographic Society for almost sixty years, first as a free-lance, then as a staff photographer for thirty-five years. As you might imagine I have had a lot of adventures – from corralling cobras in India to sailing down the middle of Russia on the Volga River. My latest adventure has been right here in Middlebury!
The Sheldon Museum under the direction of Bill Brooks, has one of the most interesting archives of photographs. It is well looked after by Sheldon Archivist Eva Garcelon-Hart. Last summer I was shown this modern climate-controlled facility after I had expressed admiration for some of the Sheldon’s pictures. As Eva donned her white cotton gloves, she explained that there were close to 30,000 photos in the collection. Some of these photographs date back to the 1840s, shortly after photography was invented.
Over lunch, on the deck of the Storm Café, we talked about how to show our fellow citizens this treasure of history that had been collected by one of their own, Mr. Henry Sheldon. That afternoon we agreed that an exhibit was in order. But who would do the editing, the scanning and the printing? I was happy to volunteer, and looked forward to finding the many gems that lay hidden in that dark protective vault.
So, once a week, Eva would bring several heavy boxes to my studio. We would spend the day selecting the best images. She would return the following week with new material and we would look at the result of the work I had done to enhance the images and make the best possible prints. We repeated this process all during the fall and winter of 2017 and what you see in the exhibit is just a small sample of the best in the collection.
A note on the prints: each is a full frame representation of the original small print. To get the best fidelity, each image was scanned at up to 1200 dpi (dots per inch). Then the image was cleaned of dust and imperfections and printed on archival Epson Legacy Fibre paper.
The Sheldon invites you to continue to enjoy the photographs by purchasing one of the framed prints in the exhibit or unframed prints available in the Museum Store. 100% of sales benefit the Sheldon Museum and the archival collections of the Research Center.
We hope you enjoy the exhibit!
James P. Blair, Curator
See the Gallery Talk by James P. Blair about this exhibit here