Laying Claim to the Land(scape): Chansonetta Stanley Emmons

Please join us to explore the photograpy of Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, Kingfield native and sister of famed inventors F.E. and F.O. Stanley.

Emmons made striking photographs of rural life in Maine and greater New England for four decades, from 1897 to 1937. Her photographs portray everyday practices and farming, capturing elderly New England farmers of a passing generation. In photographs of tidy homesteads, simple farmhouses, and the rituals of harvesting, Emmons reproduced the imagery of an earlier agrarian ideal, staging a way of life that had all but disappeared by the early twentieth century. Although better known for her work in the Northeast, Emmons also photographed in the Southeast, making rare studies of African American tenant farmers in the Carolinas. Emmons's photographs were not widely circulated during her lifetime, but they nevertheless participated in important ideas about labor, landscape, race, and nation in the early twentieth century.

Shawn Michelle Smith's books include American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton 1999), Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture(Duke 2004), and Lynching Photographs, co-authored with Dora Apel (California 2007).

This event is just one of the programs that Maine Historical Society offers.  Please check our website regularly for a full, up-to-date list of upcoming programs.