This story was originally published in October 2022.
PORTLAND, Maine – In 1898, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons’ husband James died at the age of 41 from sudden blood poisoning.
Suddenly, Emmons was a 37-year-old widow and single mother with a seven-year-old daughter, living in a Boston suburb, hundreds of miles from her parents’ home in western Maine.
Yet in the midst of this sudden reversal of her fortunes, Emmons also discovered her true calling, which would occupy her eager mind and satisfy her creative curiosity for the rest of her life.
Photography.
Emmons, a trained teacher and painter, spent the rest of her life photographing throughout the United States and Canada, always paying particular attention to her home state, its characters and its agrarian life.
In the early 20th century, Emmons was aware that she was witnessing the last days of an older version of Maine and used her camera to capture, document and preserve what she saw for future generations.
The Maine Historical Society in Portland hosted an exhibition in 2022 and 2023, also available online, showcasing some of Emmons’ celebrated works from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The exhibition, titled “Chansonetta Stanley Emmons: Staging the Past,” was curated by Tilly Laskey and is based on scholarship from Emmons’ biographer Marius B. Peladeau and the Stanley Museum.
The Stanley Museum in Emmons’ hometown of Kingfield houses the Chansonetta Stanley Emmons Photographic Collection.
“I cannot let it rest and find it so fascinating that I have not painted a single line since I got the camera,” Emmons wrote in a letter shortly before her husband’s death.
Emmons wrote to Freelan Stanley, one of her six brothers, who – along with his twin brother Francis – later became famous for producing Stanley Steamer automobiles. Before their steam car project, the pair first invented a formula for dry, photographic glass plate negative and mass production processes.
Their patented photography technology made them rich, especially after the company was sold to Kodak.
They invested their fortune in cars, hotels and her sister and supported her and her daughter Dorothy for the rest of their lives. Thanks to the financial support, Emmons was able to give up commercial photography and concentrate fully on her art.
The historical society’s current exhibition features Emmons’ images of rural farm life in the Pine Tree State.
Emmon often photographs her elderly neighbors in western Maine, carefully recreating everyday scenes in staged but never boring tableaux. The images, all bathed in natural window light, are reminiscent of Old Master paintings from Europe.
In one photo, a woman shells peas into a basket on her lap. In another, young Dorothy stacks cobs while an older man shells corn.
A deceptively simple image shows two elderly women, dressed in clean dresses and fresh aprons, sitting on chairs facing each other in a kitchen.
But upon closer inspection, the photo reveals many other wonderful period details, including ornate shelf brackets, patterned flooring, stacked books and newspapers, and elegant wood-paneled doors.
The cover image of the exhibition shows a woman in a long skirt drawing water from a fountain amidst an explosion of hollyhocks and other garden flowers.
Emmons’ work, like that of other women who photographed domestic life at the time, is sometimes dismissed as sentimental and trite, a yearning for an idealized past that was long gone by the time her pictures were made.
Laskey disagrees.
“I don’t think she was really nostalgic,” Laskey said. “I really feel like that’s how her neighbors lived.”
In the book Maine Photography, 1840-2015, Maine historian Libby Bischof points out that most of the state of Maine lagged far behind major American cities in terms of technological advancement.
“The agrarian ideal was very much alive in Maine when these women took photographs,” Bischoff wrote, “and although these photographers sometimes staged some of their images or overemphasized old customs, they also captured what parts of rural Maine actually looked like during this era.”
One of the most striking photographs in the exhibition is a direct frontal portrait of the bearded Reverend Emery Butts from 1901.
With the direct view into the camera lens, the image appears traditional and at the same time thoroughly modern.
It’s a formal head-and-shoulders portrait, but the subject appears completely relaxed in the photo. Laskey says it shows how relaxed Emmons could portray her subjects, even when photographing them with the slow, clunky wooden cameras of the era.
“She had a gift for making people feel good and gaining their trust, even though she was a perfectionist,” Laskey said.
The current show also focuses on Emmons’ rarely seen hand-painted slides.
Around 1925, the photographer printed many of her best photographs on large glass slides that could be projected onto a screen in a darkened room. Emmons’ daughter Dorothy then colored them all by hand, giving the images an almost lithographic appearance.
The two, who were inseparable, traveled around giving talks and presentations at churches and civic groups. By this time, Emmons had almost completely lost her hearing, so Dorothy spoke publicly while her mother operated the projector.
“This was a way for me to publicize her photos and make a little money,” Laskey said.
Emmons died in 1937 at the age of 78. Dorothy followed him in 1960.
Emmons’ nephew Raymond Stanley rescued her collection of photographic prints, negatives and color slides when the family home in Kingfield was evacuated after Dorothy’s death.
Raymond Stanley eventually donated around 1,600 items to his family’s museum of the same name.
The Maine Historical Society is in the process of digitizing all images found at MaineMemory.net.
Laskey is grateful that Emmons’ work was saved and now gives modern Mainers a picture of what life was like back then.
“She did it because she was an artist and it fed her soul,” Laskey said, “and she also wanted to document a life that she saw changing rapidly.”
