Meredith library celebrates 'New Hampshire Now' photo book

MEREDITH — For nearly three years, 47 professional photographers pointed their lenses at New Hampshire, scattering themselves to all corners of the state to produce New Hampshire Now, a contemporary photographic essay. On Tuesday evening, the project's leads, Ian Raymond, Inez McDermott and Gary Samson convened for a meet-the-artists panel at the Meredith Public Library, to celebrate and explain the work.

The book features photographs from every sector of New Hampshire, with images of agriculture, natural beauty and small town life, to homelessness, political tension, climate change and pandemic.

“It took six months of editing and putting the book together,” explained Samson, president of the New Hampshire Society of Photographic Artists and the project's director. There were 10,000 photos submitted to the project, but they had space for only 250. “Those 10,000 photos will go to the New Hampshire Historical Society to create an archive,” Samson said. “They'll be available for research the way photographs that were made 100 years ago are. To me that's the most important part of this project.”

In addition to his role as project director, Samson is also a life-long photographer that traces his artistic roots to photographing the old mill buildings during his childhood in Manchester. When asked of his motivations for tackling such a massive project, Samson joked, “I'm 70, I'm not getting any younger.”

His youthful spirit, however was instrumental in completing the project.

“I'm a 12-year-old kid trapped in 70-year-old man's body who's also naive enough to think 'we can pull this off,'” Samson said.

On a more serious note, Samson added that he was inspired by the work of the photographers of the Farm Securities Administration, who famously documented the plight of the rural poor during the great depression.

“We look back at the photos that document the depression this pivotal moment in American history, now we have COVID documented in New Hampshire and Black Lives Matter, and the homeless in Manchester and New Hampshire Presidential primary,” Samson said.

As the project expanded and went along, Samson realized that every aspect of the book, down to the paper it was printed on, needed to be pure New Hampshire. In addition to each photographer being New Hampshire-based, the book was published locally by Peter Randall Publishers, printed by Puritan Press in Hollis on locally harvested paper from Monadnock Paper Mills.

Due to the historical context of the work, Art Historian Inez McDermott of New England College came on board.

“Gary asked me to look at the layout of the book, and I asked him if there was a lecture series to go with it and he said no, so I volunteered to put together a lecture series,” McDermott said. “Each exhibition has a lecture that accompanies it, so my role is to give it historical context by talking about the FSA photographs and other photographic projects throughout history that are similar to this."

Of the 10,000 photographs submitted, 2,200 of them were taken by Laconia photographer and vice president of the New Hampshire Society of Photographic Artists, Ian Raymond. In total, he took more than 40,000 photographs over the course of the project. Despite his massive contribution to the project, Raymond stated that the breadth and depth of New Hampshire Now would not have been possible alone.

“No one photographer could have done this work,” Raymond said. “We went out like a spiderweb. There were 47 points of view brought to bear. That's one of the great values of this book. People have bias, but when you have a lot of people you get rid of a lot of it.”

As for future projects, Samson said that New Hampshire Now “almost killed” him.

“Certainly I'd love to see our organization do another project like this,” Samson said, saying it would be exciting if there was a group of photographers who would document the state about every 10 years. “I don't know that I would want to pick up the gauntlet...”

“It would be great to see communities pick it up,” McDermott chimed in, “and you could give them some sort of guidance.”