Upcoming Exhibition
Making a Living: Businesses in Philipstown and Beyond, 1850–1970
August 1st - December 19th
The West Point Foundry was the cornerstone of the local economy for almost a century (1817–1911), but it was hardly the only business in town. Making a Living: Businesses in Philipstown and Beyond, 1850–1970, the new exhibition at the Putnam County Historical Society’s Foundry School Museum, takes a look at the other commercial enterprises that formed the diversifying Philipstown economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Comprised of early photographs, books, prints, artifacts, and memorabilia drawn from private families and the PCHS’s own collection, the exhibition is organized geographically and provides historical portraits of five centers of local commerce: Cold Spring, Nelsonville, Garrison Landing, Manitou, and the Route 9/Albany Post Road corridor. It shows how local businesses developed as the community grew, illuminating an important dimension of Philipstown as a whole.
There are no General Motors or Microsofts here. The businesses depicted are the kind of essential enterprises that kept their owners — and the community — going through good times and bad: retail and hospitality establishments, transportation and construction companies, blacksmith shops, and real estate and other service firms.
PCHS members are invited to an opening reception on July 31, from 5:00 to 7:00. The exhibition opens to the public August 1, at 11:00 and will remain at the Foundry School Museum until December 19.
The museum is located at 63 Chestnut Street in the village of Cold Spring and open Wednesday-Sunday, 11-5. Admission is $5, children, $2, seniors and PCHS members, free. More information is available at 845-265-4010.
Current Exhibition
Stunning 21st-Century School of Hudson River Images
on View
at Putnam County Historical Society.
New exhibition of panoramic photographs by Nelsonville’s Richard Saunders
February 28 to July 25, 2010
Visitors to the stunning new exhibition at the Putnam County Historical Society’s Foundry School Museum, Seasons and Light: Photographs of the Hudson Highlands by Richard Saunders, will likely first be struck by the broad panoramas Saunders has captured. Many of the 42 photographs on view are more than three and half feet wide and depict nearly 180-degree views of the Hudson River and the surrounding landscape. But time and closer inspection reveal it is Saunders’s unerring eye for the quiet subtleties of light and color that gives these pictures their magically ethereal quality.
In one image, the blues, reds, and yellows on the side of a barge on the river appear hand colored against the steely grays of the Bear Mountain Bridge and surrounding hillsides. In another, orange sunlight illuminates mist over the river and the hills beyond. The silence of the Audubon Sanctuary boardwalk stretching into a wintry Constitution Marsh is palpable in a third.
"Fall and winter are my favorite seasons," Saunders says. "Fall for obvious reasons, winter because of the light."
Saunders, who owns Hudson Rogue Co., a shop that carries antiquarian prints on Nelsonville’s Main Street, grew up in Cornwall-on-Hudson and is a lifelong resident of the Hudson Highlands. But he didn’t start photographing his own backyard until four or five years ago.
"Customers kept asking if I had any pictures of the area for sale—not old images, but new ones, souvenirs. I usually don’t like to mix old and new, but I decided to try my hand at taking a few."
Early on, he happened by accident on a software program that merges multiple images into the seamless panoramas on view at the Foundry School Museum. The effect can be dramatic. In one of a handful of photographs from outside the region, Saunders captures an entirely new view of the oft-photographed Brooklyn Bridge — it makes the structure’s span seem almost twice what it is.
Saunders has no formal training in photography, but "it helps to have an eye," he says. He also readily admits the law of averages plays a role. For every hundred pictures he shoots, he prints two.
"It’s time consuming, merging the images, tweaking the color, getting it right. And what you see on the computer screen isn’t always what prints out on paper. So you have to start over. If I’m going to print a picture, I really have to love it."
The quality of Saunders’s photographs becomes all the more remarkable when he discloses, with a smile, that he does all his work on an oversized version of a home-office ink-jet printer that accepts a maximum size of 13-by-44-inch sheets of paper.
Viewers who look closely will notice Saunders signs his photographs with a pseudonym, Linda Mason. He took the name from one of his family’s favorite movies, a 1942 classic, Holiday Inn, starring Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby, in which Marjorie Reynolds plays Linda Mason, and she and Crosby sing the first recorded version of Irving Berlin’s hit "White Christmas."
"I know too many people in the community," he says. "When I started selling the photographs, I didn’t want anyone to feel an obligation to buy one just because they knew me."
Seasons and Light: Photographs of the Hudson Highlands by Richard Saunders opens with a reception for Historical Society members February 27 and runs through July 25. The photographs on view are for sale through the museum shop.
The Foundry School Museum is open Wednesday–Sunday, 11–5. Admission is $5, children, $2, seniors and PCHS members, free. The museum is located at 63 Chestnut Street in the village of Cold Spring, 50 miles north of New York City and 15 miles south of Poughkeepsie. Cold Spring is served by Metro-North Railroad. More information is available at 845-265-4010 or pchs-fsm.org.