Gary Samson
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. In 2017, Governor Chris Sununu appointed Gary the 7th Artist Laureate of New Hampshire. Gary has taught photography courses and workshops regionally and internationally since 1981 and his professional career in photography started in 1971 at the University of New Hampshire where he served as the University Filmmaker and Manager of Photography.
Gary’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Currier Museum of Art; the Institute of Art, and Design at New England College; the state of New Hampshire; the University of New Hampshire Art Museum; and the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, as well as in many private collections.
The work of Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, and Lotte Jacobi have significantly influenced the direction of his photography and led him to embrace large format cameras for much of his portrait and documentary photography. Gary’s fine art portraits are primarily made on black and white film or through the collodion wet-plate process using either 4x5, and 8x10 inch view cameras. His favorite printing mediums include gelatin silver and platinum prints made from in-camera negatives as well as digital printing from scanned negatives. Craft is a very important part of his work and he enjoys every step in the process of bringing a print to life and presenting it to an audience.
Gary’s passion and accomplishments in photography led to his 2001 appointment as Chair of the Photography Department at the Institute of Art and Design at NEC, where he taught both digital and traditional film based photography courses as part of the BFA Photography program. His retirement in 2017 has provided him with the much needed time to start organizing his archives of prints and negatives and to work on a number of fine art photography projects and books.
““The work presented here is part of a decade and a half long project exploring nude and clothed portraits of women in the 21st century. I try to minimize the direction the shoot will take so that the subject will feel completely comfortable providing ideas that will lead to a true collaborative process. Often the mood the subject is in will drive the emotional direction of the session. Sometimes a strong working relationship with a subject emerges, allowing me to create extended portraits of them over many years either in the studio or on location. In 2016, The Vermont Center for Photography gave me a one person show, Unburdened Beauty, where I exhibited forty-seven photographs from this body of work.””