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Renowned fine arts photographer and photography educator Gary Samson is a visual historian, an artist devoted to documenting the people, places and events that comprise life in New Hampshire through photography and filmmaking. Employing a variety of photographic techniques—straight silver prints, giclées, hand-colored photographs—Samson creates richly nuanced images whose tonalities are exquisite.
Samson views himself primarily as a portrait photographer who seeks constantly to capture the unique personality of his subject. His approach to portrait photography is strongly influenced by the internationally renowned photographer Lotte Jacobi whom Samson came to know intimately after making a film about her life and helping her to catalogue her archive of 47,000 negatives. In 1979, Samson produced a film on Jacobi, Lotte Jacobi: A Film Portrait.
In 1984 the New Hampshire Council on the Arts recognized Samson’s formidable skills as a portraitist, awarding him a fellowship to create environmental portraits of New Hampshire artists and writers, and in 1998 his works were included in the exhibition Moments in Time: Master Photographs from the Currier Gallery of Art.
Samson earned a degree in photography from the Franklin Institute in Boston, MA and has continued to perfect his art over the years through a series of workshops at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY; the Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport, ME; and the New England Document Conservation Center in Andover, MA. He currently serves as Chair of the Photography Department at the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, NH, a position he has held since 2001. Prior to joining the Institute, Samson served first as a photographer and then as Manager of Photography and Film Production at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.
Samson’s photographs have appeared in numerous exhibits in the greater Manchester area as well as in Canada at the McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal, Quebec, and at the Festival de l’été indien in Andrézieux-Bouthéon, France, the latter at the invitation of the French government. Additionally his photographs have illustrated a host of catalogues including Deeply Rooted: New Hampshire Traditions in Wood; By Good Hands: New Hampshire Folk Art; and New Hampshire Photographs: The Portrait and the Environment to name a few. Samson has also produced nearly two dozen 16mm films including A World Within a World: The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company; Lotte Jacobi: A Film Portrait; and Milltown. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Currier Museum of Art and the New Hampshire Institute of Art, both in Manchester, New Hampshire; the State of New Hampshire; and the Art Galleries at the University of New Hampshire, as well as in numerous private collections.
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