BENNINGTON- Bennington Museum will exhibit photography drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, as well as other local collections, such as Bennington College’s, featuring such prominent photographers as Alfred Stieglitz, Lee Friedlander, Lewis Hine, and Ansel Adams. “The Quality of Place: Photography, Space, and Specificity,” shown through August 30, examines how photography has been used over the years to convey a sense of “place.”

This exhibit offers a range of images including albumen prints of landmarks in Bennington such as the Catamount Tavern and the Bennington Battle Monument to images by prominent photographers, such as Benmont Avenue taken by Lewis Hine in 1909. Also on view is an atmospheric view of the Bennington College campus and interior shots of the Old First Church by Clara Sipprell from the 1930s. A small group of photographs depicting places both distant and near by Kevin Bubriski, a nationally prominent photographer who lives in Shaftsbury, brings the show to our own age.

One of the sections of the exhibit, entitled “Arm Chair Explorer,” features an album of early salt print photographs of Egypt, Greece, and the Middle East taken by Brattleboro native Leavitt Hunt in 1852. Stereographs created by the H. C. White Company in North Bennington at the turn of the 20th century of exotic places from across the world are also on view. These both represent how photography was used to capture a place, codify it, and bring it to people who could not actually be there.

Images from the museum collection by both famous and anonymous photographers are also included in the exhibit. For the last two years, Bennington Museum has been working to digitize approximately 8,000 glass plate negatives in its collection. To date, approximately 4,000 of these have been catalogued and 3,000 have been scanned. In addition to the museum’s sizable collection of historic photographic prints, these newly digitized negatives offer a broad look at what Bennington and surrounding towns looked like, or how people with cameras wanted them to look like over the years.

Illustrating two opposing schools of photography in the early 20th century, Hine’s photograph of mill housing on Benmont Avenue in 1909 is viewed with an image of Bennington College taken by Sipprell around 1939.

These contrasting images represent those who supported the idea that photography should be an unvarnished “straight” depiction of the subject (Hine), and those who used photography as a medium to create beautiful, atmospheric works of art (Sipprell). This juxtaposition also demonstrates how varied a place like Bennington can be. From a working class mill town to home of one of the country’s most forward thinking colleges, it reflects how different photographers have been able to capture differences with the photographic medium.

This insightful exhibition explores the history of photography and shows how the medium captured, transformed, and added to the ambiguous and multifaceted concept of “place.”

Mainly seen as a scientific and objective tool in its early years, photography was believed to be an unerring eye that froze and captured a specific bit of time and location for later contemplation by those both close and distant to the site.

By the late 19th century, it was becoming accepted as an artistic medium, and began to be used to record more than the surface reality of the subject. “Place” was now approached with a more questioning gaze. Photographers began to question how focus, angle, subject selection, and other artistic decisions affected the viewers’ perceptions. Once established as an artistic medium, photography became more easily and widely accessible to the general public, opening the door to artists, scientists, commercial photographers, and amateurs alike, thereby enabling them to express their concept of “place.”

The Bennington Museum is located at 75 Main Street (Route 9). For information visit www.benningtonmuseum.org or call (802) 447-1571.