Photo book shows all sides of New Hampshire life
Oct. 17—I ts postcard-perfect coastline and mountains are only part of New Hampshire's identity — and a new collection of photos aims to show the entirety of the Granite State.
"New Hampshire Now: A Photographic Diary of Life in the Granite State" is a hefty tome of more than 250 photos, taken all over the state between 2018 and 2020 by local photographers.
The images document sunsets and house fires, homelessness, hiking and country fairs — as well as the presidential primary, the beginning of the pandemic, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
"We would hope people outside the state could look at it and realize New Hampshire is not just farm country. There are cities. There's a lot of diversity," said Michael Sterling of the New Hampshire Society for Photographic Arts, one of the book's editors.
The idea began with one photographer's project to do a profile of Peterborough, Sterling said, and grew into a massive collaborative effort to document all of New Hampshire.
Beginning in 2018, a roster that would eventually grow to 46 New Hampshire photographers started taking pictures, showing the state the way they see it.
The images are beautiful — composed with care, capturing important moments from the past three years and the quiet pauses between those moments — but what they depict is not always pretty.
"This is not a travel book," Sterling said.
Mark Bolton, a photographer whose work often appears in the Union Leader, contributed many of the photographs. His experience as a photojournalist helped him jostle into crowded rooms, shoot tense moments and take in people's stories.
Bolton said he looked to Works Progress Administration photographers — photographers like Gordon Parks and Dorothea Lange, who captured daily life during the Depression — for guidance as he shot workers, protesters, people experiencing homelessness. He also looked for parallels between his life and the lives of other Granite Staters, which led him to photograph fathers in prison in Concord and Berlin.
"Me being a dad, I couldn't even imagine not seeing my son," Bolton said. The book includes portraits he shot of two imprisoned men with their children — one from an in-person visit in Berlin, and another in which a father could only speak to his son through a computer screen.
The project gave Bolton a reason to travel to parts of the state he had never visited, and give himself assignments he had never taken on for a newspaper.
"I wanted to concentrate not on the pretty, because I knew other photographers would do that," he said. "I was keying in on the people who live here."
But the out-of-time landscape is part of what makes New Hampshire New Hampshire, from the Uncanoonucs that watch over Manchester to the White Mountains, where photographer Susan Hershey took a photo of a yellow train chugging across a bridge, one of three serene landscapes she contributed to the book.
Shooting landscapes is all about planning, Hershey said. While Bolton might wait for a subject to come into frame at just the right moment, Hershey explained she planned days in advance to find just the right light, the right weather and clouds, and the right timing in the train's schedule to scramble up Crawford Notch.
"Landscape photography is completely connected to the color of the lighting," she said. "I think it is very different here in New England, in terms of the light we get. I'm sure it's all connected to these crazy weather patterns we have that are coming and going very quickly!"
Photographers submitted thousands of photos for the project. Sterling and four other editors whittled the collection down to just over 250. The book is arranged in chronological order, beginning in mid-2018 and ending just after the 2020 presidential election.
The project initially had been set to end sooner, Sterling said. But in early 2020, as it became clear history was happening, the project was extended through the election.
"One of the objectives of this project is this historical record," Sterling said. "This is a historical document as opposed to — I always joke and say — lighthouses and tugboats and the White Mountains."
Digital copies of the images will become part of the New Hampshire Historical Society's collection, and local historical societies around the state are participating in the release of "New Hampshire Now."
Sterling said the buzz around the book's release has led to new members for the society — and excitement about collective works to come.
"The question has come up already, 'What's next?" Sterling said. "We have no conclusion yet, but what's next is always a good question."
