This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ...
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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
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Another outstanding example of the printer's art is Samuel Chamberlain's THE NEW ENGLAND IMAGE [Hastings House,1964] with its images of vivid clarity and sharpness, velvety blacks, dazzling whites, subtle shadows. One may believe the scenes depicted are too perfect, too beautiful to be true, but in fact, they reveal what much of New England really looked like in the 1930s, '40 and '50s, and in large measure, still does, although most of the beautiful, magisterial elm trees which once flourished in the area have died off. To be sure, as the photographer observed, these images record "fair weather New England", which does not mean that New England isn't often beautiful in bad weather as well. Apart from Chamberlain's great photographic eye , the extraordinary quality of the reproductions in this book is the result of large negatives made with view cameras and the photogravure printing process (which was only used in the early editions of the book: the reproductions in later editions are not nearly as goo) Chamberlain was trained as an architect and became a skilled etcher (see his beautiful plates [they are actual etchings] in the 1942 Limited Editions Club's THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS). He took up photography in the 1930s and published more than 30 picture books, all focusing on New England subjects and locations. He died in 1975
* Alas, many of the residents of much of interior New England are disparately poor and live mean lives in anything but picture-post card paradises - places often marked by dead cars in the front yards. The region never really recovered from the ravages of the Great Depression and the decline
and flight of the textile industry in the early decades of the 20th century. And, as in the rest of the US, industrial activity in New England has continued to shrink. Paradoxically, New England's long economic stasis has (along with cold, dry weather)helped preserve it's hundreds of thousands of beautiful, architecturally significant 18th and 19th century wooden buildings.
