It is no accident, then that the dust jacket on Beverly’s first collection of island images bears her classic photo “Foggy Road.” My Nantucket: Images of an Island, commemorating her forty years as a professional photographer and just published in June, does more than evoke a simpler time. Beverly’s photographs burrow into the island’s soul and emerge with elements of its heart: joy, love, laughter, like minds, neighbors, tranquility, discovery, passion, and, not least for Beverly, spirituality.
She landed on Nantucket by accident. One day in 1964 her younger brother and only sibling, Gary, was on Martha’s Vineyard and asked her to deliver a tennis racket to him from their family home in Queens, New York. She took the ferry to the wrong island. Call it fate, call it destiny, call it what you will, but Beverly had happened upon her spiritual home. The following year she started the Children’s Gallery on Old South Wharf and simultaneously embarked |
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on a career as a professional photographer, although she knew little and cared even less about the darkroom. Later,after her career was firmly established, she had a studio at the Center Street Meeting House that had no door and where her postcards came to represent the last bastion of the honor system on Nantucket—a basket was left out to collect the money.
The art studio for children eventually dissolved, and Beverly Hall Photography took wing. Now, after forty years, she has brought together some of her earliest black-and-white images of the island in My Nantucket. It matters little who the actual people are or where the exact locations are in her images (although the “Photographer’s Notes” at the back of the book explain all). What comes through is how the pic- tures, often of seemingly
mundane subjects—a snow fence, a watering can, a feather, a seagull, or familiar landmarks— capture an inner truth about the
island that is deeply affecting. |
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