The Portsmouth Historical Society presents a panel discussion exploring the New Hampshire Now exhibition with art historian Inez McDermott and photographers Dan Gingras, Michael Sterling, and Gary Samson. The panel will discuss the role of the documentary photography project throughout American history and its potential to make change as they make connections with the images and themes found in the exhibition.
Thursday, December 9, 2021 at 6:00 pm
In-person and via Zoom
Tickets are FREE
Dan Gingras
Dan Gingras started his photographic career as a newspaper photographer for seven years before earning a master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science. His fifty-year love of photography and technology merged, as photography became digital and as computers became integral to composition and imaging.
Inez McDermott
Inez McDermott has been a professor of Art History at New England College since 2000. In her courses she encourages students to examine the role of art in public life and to discover the ways in which the creative process can play a role in social engagement, participatory democracy, and activism. Inez’ research interests focus on historical and contemporary New Hampshire art and artists with a particular interest in 19th century photography. She has also curated major exhibitions at museums in the region, including A House of Dreams Untold, the story of the MacDowell Colony, at the New Hampshire Historical Society in 1996, and, most recently as a co-curator of Mount Washington, The Crown of New England, (2017) at the Currier Museum in Manchester, NH. Inez has served on statewide arts and humanities boards in the state, and currently serves as a board member for the Saint-Gaudens’ Memorial, which supports the work of the only national park dedicated to an artist, in Cornish, NH.
Gary Samson
Gary Samson has been a fine art photographer and educator for forty years. His work has been exhibited in Europe and Canada, as well as in the United States, and can be found in numerous collections including the Library of Congress and the Currier Museum of Art. In 2017, Gary was appointed the seventh Artist Laureate of New Hampshire and Professor Emeritus of Photography by the Institute of Art and Design at New England College
🌐 Gary Samson Photography 
@gary.samson1
Michael Sterling
Michael Sterling is immediate past president of the New Hampshire Society of Photographic Artists and a contributing photographer for a number of local magazines, newspapers, and nonprofits. Sterling’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Exeter Chamber of Commerce and Cambridge Trust and was exhibited in Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s Experience New Hampshire event in Washington, DC. Artistic interests include architecture and historic interiors, cityscapes, and environmental portraiture.
🌐 Michael Sterling Photography
This panel discussion has been made possible by a generous grant by the New Hampshire Humanities.
New Hampshire Now: A Photographic Diary of Life in the Granite State
October 1, 2021–December 23, 2021
Opening reception October 1, 2021, 5:30pm
New Hampshire Now is a two-year project to photographically record life in New Hampshire. Nearly 50 photographers traveled throughout the state between 2018 and 2020, making thousands of images that collectively create a twenty-first-century portrait of the people, places, culture, and events in New Hampshire. This project documents contemporary life in our state, in much the same way that photography projects of the past have done, such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange during the Great Depression and Lewis Hines when he visited the mills of Manchester in the early 1900s. The thousands of images created during this project form a powerful visual archive of both the ordinary and extraordinary events of our time.
Organized by the New Hampshire Society of Photographic Artists and the New Hampshire Historical Society, eight exhibitions held in the seven regions of the state will all open simultaneously on October 1, 2021. Each exhibition will display photographs unique to that region of the state, while the flagship exhibition at the New Hampshire Historical Society in Concord will display images that represent the state as a whole. Each organization is determining how long the exhibition will be open at their facility, so everyone’s closing date will be different.
Exhibition Locations
Belknap Mill Society, Laconia
Colby Sawyer College, New London
Portsmouth Historical Society, Portsmouth
Historical Society of Cheshire County, Keene
Manchester Historic Association, Manchester
Museum of the White Mountains, Plymouth
New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord
Tillotson Center, Colebrook
Exhibition Sponsors
This ambitious project has been made possible thanks to the generous support of our corporate sponsor, New Hampshire Mutual Bancorp, and its affiliates (NH Trust, Meredith Village Savings Bank, Merrimack County Savings Bank, and the Savings Bank of Walpole), along with Monadnock Paper Mills, Puritan Press, and Red River Paper, with support from Kimball Jenkins School of Art. Additional support for the publication was provided by Furthermore, a J. M. Kaplan Fund.
The Book
The book New Hampshire Now features more than 250 images from the project. It will be available for sale at each of the exhibitions and at many independent bookstores around the state. The book is a New Hampshire product, published by Peter Randall Publishers and printed by Puritan Press on paper from Monadnock Paper Mills and Red River Paper.
The book includes forewords by Bill Dunlap and Project Director Gary Samson and an introduction by beloved New Hampshire author Howard Mansfield.
