A Window Back: Photography in a Whaling Port

This unique portrait of New England's yesterdays recounts the history of photography in the New Bedford area between 1845 and 1920. It describes photographic processes and the cameras used, while painting an intimate portrait of a bygone era. A Window Back portrays the working waterfront, factory interiors, farms, cityscapes, and people at leisure. Sail aboard wooden ships persuing whales and exploring the seas; visit the blacksmiths and coopers on the waterfront.

A Window Back is a delightful and informative treasure of old photographs from the days of historic New Bedford. Its creator, Nicholas Whitman, is a competent and thoughtful photographer who learned his craft at the Rochester Institute of Technology and came to New Bedford dreaming about author Melville's Moby Dick.

When I met Nick, he had just taken a temporary project at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. However, the scope of his work gradually lengthened into the establishment of an excellent photographic library, safe storage for negatives and prints, and a filing system that greatly improved the accessibility of the museum's priceless collection.

I was looking for photographs to enhance a nautical book I was writing. On behalf of the museum, Nick not only found me ideal photographs but furnished me with beautiful prints of them. In addition, he made new negatives of several of my old photos so that both the museum and I could have revitalized copies. Thanks to Nick, my initial narrow interest grew into an appreciation of photographic collections and of the urgency to complete them before the demise of folks who might help to identify prints or search through their attics for fading and forgotten photographs.

As Nick organized the museum's photographs and added to the collection, the advantages of putting together a photographic book with a local focus became increasingly apparent. Such a book could give a firsthand look at New Bedford as seen through the eyes of those who lived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I feel confident that A Window Back will inspire others to search out, organize, and identify their own photographic collections, ones which will be of great interest and importance to current generations and those to come.