Biography
a Narrative about Life Behind the Lens
Gary Samson is a fine art photographer and photo educator who has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships for his work during the past forty years. He is currently serving as the Artist Laureate of New Hampshire after retiring as the Chair of the Photography Department at the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, NH. Gary has taught photography courses and workshops regionally and internationally since 1981 and his career in photography started in 1971 at the University of New Hampshire where he served as the University Filmmaker and Manager of Photography.
In 1984 he received his second fellowship from the New Hampshire Council on the Arts for his environmental portraits of New Hampshire artists and writers. Some of Mr. Samson’s subjects include Donald Hall, Jon Brooks, Elizabeth Yates, Dudley Laufman, Lotte Jacobi, Richard Whitney, James Aponovich, and David Lamb. Gary’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Currier Museum of Art, the New Hampshire Institute of Art, the state of New Hampshire, the University of New Hampshire Art Museum and the National Archives in Washington, DC as well as in private collections.
In the fall of 1998 his work was included in the exhibition Moments in Time: Master Photographs from the Currier Museum of Art’s permanent collection and in the fall of 1999, a portfolio of his portrait work was exhibited in Andrezieux-Boutheon, France at the invitation of the French government.
Gary served as the official photographer for New Hampshire, when the state was one of three featured programs at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 1999, documenting the performances, demonstrations and events presented by over one hundred and forty NH traditional craftspeople and musicians and occupational specialists.
Cultural photography and documentary filmmaking assignments over the past four decades have taken him to Russia, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Peru, Ireland, France, Labrador, Belize, Cape Breton and New Orleans as well as the White House. At UNH, Gary produced ten films exploring the history and culture of the state of New Hampshire and these documentary films have been aired locally, regionally and nationally on cable broadcasts such as Cinemax, and on commercial and public television stations.
After producing a film on the life of internationally acclaimed portrait photographer Lotte Jacobi, Gary spent six years working with Ms. Jacobi cataloging her archive of 47,000 negatives which were donated to the University of New Hampshire in 1981. Ms. Jacobi’s archive which is housed at the Dimond Library includes portraits of Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Mann, J. D. Salinger, Marc Chagall and Kathe Kollwitz and many more.
Gary has extensively utilized 19th and 20th century photographic collections in the production of films and exhibitions about New Hampshire's rich industrial history. His best known films, A World Within A World: The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company and Milltown, are sensitive portrayals of Manchester's textile mills and the immigrant people who labored in them.
He traces his appreciation for and love of photography to a summer job he had in 1968 at the Manchester Historic Association. One of his responsibilities was to make contact prints from the glass negative collection documenting the city of Manchester and the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company. This extensive archive of prints and negatives impressed upon him the importance of photography as a tool for sharing history and culture with a wide audience.
In 1982 he organized and curated an exhibition on the Franco-American experience in New Hampshire which traveled to Canada and France as well as throughout museums in New England. Mr. Samson has also written several books on New Hampshire history including A World Within a World: Manchester, The Mills and the Immigrant Experience and in collaboration with Elizabeth Hengen, Capitol Views: A Photographic History of Concord, New Hampshire 1850-1930.
Collaborating with UNH Professor Burt Feintuch, Gary photographically illustrated the book In the Blood: Conversations on Culture, published in the fall of 2010 by Utah State University Press and Cape Breton University Press. Gary spent two months in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia photographing the people, culture and landscape of this ruggedly beautiful island in the North Atlantic. An exhibition of this work was showcased at the Cape Breton University Art Gallery in the fall of 2010. Two more books have followed from this initial collaboration, Talking New Orleans Music: Crescent City Musicians Talk about Their Lives, Their Music and Their City, published in the fall of 2015 by the University Press of Mississippi. They are currently working on a book about Zydeco music also to be published by the University Press of Mississippi.
In 2001 Mr. Samson was appointed Chair of the Photography Department at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, Manchester, NH where he taught both digital and traditional film based photography courses as part of the BFA in Photography program. A WMUR New Hampshire Chronicle Report recently featured Mr. Samson’s long career in photography and his teaching at the college over the last thirty-six years.
In May 2017, Gary was appointed Professor Emeritus of Photography, New Hampshire Institute of Art, upon his retirement from the college. In the spring of 2018, Gary was given a two year appointment as Artist Laureate of New Hampshire by Governor John Sununu.