Page 6. MAINE COASTAL NEWS March 2018 The National Fisherman Photo Archives at PMM
SEARSPORT – Photographs are worth a thousand words as they capture a piece of time and freeze it. All too often photographs are not kept, fi nding their way to the public land fi ll or simply destroyed through neglect. It is important that we preserve photographs so we can look back in time and understand our history better. Photographs need to be kept in good condition and one place to do that is at a museum with climate control. It should also be a museum that feels that the public needs access to them. The Penobscot Marine Museum has
a fine collection of photographs, more than 100,000 images of all subjects, but mostly maritime-related, and all on line for the public to view. Ben Fuller, the curator of the Museum, knew that the magazine National Fisherman had an archive of pho- tographs and he thought they should come to the Museum and be with the collection of photographs from the magazine Atlantic Fisherman. Matt Wheeler, of the Museum’s photo archives, explained, “Ben paid a visit to Diversifi ed, who owns “National Fisher- man’ knowing that they had begun accepting digital only submissions. He wondered what they were going to do with their print ar- chives so he asked them about it. With some
further conversations, Diversifi ed made a decision that was to send the collection to the Museum. They rented a van and went down and picked up four fi ling cabinets full of photographs in 2012. The fi rst step was to sort through the
collection to see what was there and to look for the funds to process it. “When you are looking for money fi rst of all you want to have an idea of what you have,” said Matt. “So you are looking for diff erent type of originals, diff erent formats, object counts, maybe some rough idea about coverage in terms of subject matter or geography. Ideally you want to sort everything by type so that you can digitize it and then catalog it” Thankfully, the Museum as a number
of dedicated volunteers. Matt explained, “We have two part-time staff who have been cataloging this. They are constructing these basic databases records fi lling in what in- formation accompanies the photos and what they can tell from a layperson's perspective. Then Ben Fuller is going back through each one of these entries and adds more techni- cal information relating to vessel types, rig types, equipment types and so forth. In rare instances we have gone back using the issue citations to the original magazine articles
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to get more information but if we were to do that with every entry it would be very time-consuming.” They presently have 15,000 images
from the National Fisherman collection on line at the Museum’s website. They are now working on the last portion, which should bring the total up to about 20,000, and that should be completed by the end of winter. “There is a lot of stuff that is kind of the pedestrian,” said Matt. “There were a lot of advertisements in the magazine and product promotions and those images all made it into the fi le cabinet. There are photographs of people working at sea which to me are really provocative and it makes you want to know more about them, the vessel they are on, and where they are. In some cases we do not know those stories so we do a weekly blog posted on the National Fisherman page of our website.” This collection is not just Maine, but
all over the Atlantic , Gulf and West Coasts and some of Canada. “National Fisherman” combined with several publications (Atlan- tic Fisherman, Pacifi c Coast fi shermen and Maine Coast Fisherman) in the late 1950s. The photos that we have date back to the 1950s and they go up into the early 1990s. National Fisherman’s deal with the
photographers is that they would retain the rights. Matt added, “We had a young intern here this past summer and her sole focus the entire summer was to contact National Fisherman photographers and fi nd out what extent of permission they would give us to use images. She was able to learn that in some cases, as far as we can tell, National Fisherman retained the rights to the photo- graphs. There was one instance where we used a photographer’s image, I think it was in some promotional material for an exhibit, but he contacted us and was really unhappy that we hadn’t sought his permission. Once we actually spoke to him he softened his stance and said we were welcome to use his stuff in these ways.” Another collection that has come to the
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Penobscot Marine Museum is Jeff Deworski collection. He moved to Stonington in the 1970s when he was 17 years old he began taking lots of photographs. Matt added, “He started fi shing with other people and actually got his own boat. He became a fi xture in the Stonington fi shing community before it became a popular place to retire to or to vacation in. Jeff got to know old Stonington basically got to know the families that have been fi shing there for generations. He could see the changes that were coming and saw that it was pretty inevitable and he wanted to document this way of life before it became less and less recognizable. So he spent a lot of time in the 1970s and 1980s photograph- ing what he saw every day while he was
One of the photographs from the National Fisherman Collection.
working.” Matt was not sure how many images
this collection contains, but it is all Koda- chrome slides. They found that their scanner was not good at doing slides so they bought a camera that could copy them and give you perfectly sharp images. Another impressive collection is that
of Maynard Bray. He shot in a number of diff erent formats, but what he captured is priceless as he understood what was im- portant and what needed to be saved. This collection is about half digitized and they are also fi nishing the cataloging part of the project. This collection should be up later this spring or summer. The Museum is also looking for some
funding to improve their online platform, in order to make their website more visitor friendly said Matt. He explained, “We need to make it a little more feature-rich so we can put exhibits on there so that maybe people can create user accounts and pick favorites and go back and look at them again. We also need it so people can buy and pay for prints online. That's one of the things that helps fund the activities here.” What is impressive is the volunteers that
help to keep the photo archives. There are two full-time employees and 24 volunteers. One volunteer is over 80 years old and works a couple of days a week. Those volunteers do a lot of work getting everything cataloged and scanned. So if you have a little free time and like
looking at old photographs go the Penob- scot Marine Museum’s website and begin looking through all their images. There is just over 100,000 so it should keep you entertained for awhile.
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