Tuesday, June 9th, 2026 5:30 pm on Zoom
Local History Guild: Early Portrait Photography
Tuesday, June 9th, 2026 5:30 pm on Zoom
What’s in a picture? Now taken for granted as a tool in our pockets, the technology of photography was once exciting, new, and revolutionary. Shortly after its invention in 1839, the practice of picture-taking spread around the world and influenced popular culture. It shaped kinships and global exchange, and made a profound mark on how we see others and how we see ourselves.
Local History Guild is the NBWM’s quarterly Zoom program, an informal discussion about art, history, science and culture related to the museum’s mission, collection, and the surrounding region. In this edition of the program, we will be joined by speakers Anne Verplanck (Penn State, Harrisburg, Emerita) and Emily Voelker (UNC Greensboro) to discuss the early history of photography in the 1800s. Host and Assistant Curator of History & Culture Marina Dawn Wells will discuss the current exhibition "Look pleasant, please": Early Portrait Photography in New Bedford. This exciting conversation will take place for free online.
This Zoom program accompanies the exhibition now on view, titled "Look pleasant, please": Early Portrait Photography in New Bedford. This special exhibition of more than 400 photographic objects is on display until September 7th, 2026 at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Marina Dawn Wells is Assistant Curator of History and Culture at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Marina holds a doctorate in American Studies from Boston University and has held fellowships at the Winterthur Museum, Mystic Seaport Museum, and the Nantucket Historical Association. Wells' publications include the New England Quarterly article "Printing Whaling Masculinity in A Shoal of Sperm Whales," which won the American Historical Print Collectors Society's 2025 Lois W. Newman Essay Award. At the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Marina has curated an exhibition of coastal photography entitled Reflections; an exhibition of prints and paintings named “Entangled in the Lines”: Figuring Moby-Dick; and “Look pleasant, please”: Early Portrait Photography in New Bedford, which is on view through September 7, 2026.
Anne Verplanck is Associate Professor of American Studies at Penn State, Harrisburg Emerita. Prior to teaching full time, her 30-year museum career included serving as the Curator of Prints and Paintings at Winterthur Museum. She is currently writing The Business of Art: Cultural Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century, which focuses on the economic underpinnings and creative output of painters, photographers, engravers, and publishers in Philadelphia. She has also written on Quakers’ interest in photography and co-edited Quaker Aesthetics with Emma Lapsansky-Werner. Verplanck is a graduate of Connecticut College, where she serves as a trustee, and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at the College of William and Mary.
Emily Voelker is Assistant Professor of Art History at UNC Greensboro, where she teaches histories of photography, American art and Native American art, and across the 19th century. Her first monograph Generations: Photography, Archives & Sovereignty Across the Indigenous Atlantic is under contract with University of Washington Press. Her work also appears in the exhibition catalogue, In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890-Now (edited by Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Jaida Grey Eagle, and Casey Riley), as part of the National Archives/Mellon digital humanities project, “Wičhóoyake kiη aglí—They Bring the Stories Back: Connecting Lakota Wild West Performers to Pine Ridge Community Histories” (housed Oglala Lakota College Archives) in the edited volume Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives and Museums (edited by Nancy Marie Mithlo and Yve Chavez), and in journals such as Panorama, Transatlantica, and Photography and Culture.
About Local History Guild: Join informal conversations with experts, aficionados, librarians, archivists, curators, historic preservation specialists, historians, and collectors. Topics run the gamut from commercial fishing to historic houses, to the latest acquisitions, collections, or publications. Each moderated conversation is roughly an hour long. Each program will be recorded and will be available on the Museum's YouTube page within 4 weeks. Free and open to the public on Zoom.
