The Photography Of Richard Shute

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Introduction to the Richard G. Shute Exhibit

Richard G. Shute and his father (Charles) ran a photography studio continuously fromapproximately 1858-1877. During that time period they witnessed the evolution of photographic methods and use, photographic styles, and popular taste.

While the Shute family is not considered to be a major contributor to the development of American photography in the nineteenth century, their artistic and commercial work does merit scholarly attention since it documents consumer tastes, patterns of consumption, regional photography, and the influence of national artistic trends on local artists. Moreover, the Shute collection offers researchers insights into the social and economic changes that the island experienced in the late nineteenth century.

These commercial photographers recorded events and history for island families, social organizations, and off-island vacationers. But these images are not simply a mechanical reproduction of daily life on Martha's Vineyard. Indeed the Shute family photo studio was influenced by nineteenth century artistic trends in painting and photography. The younger Shute projects (at times) a pastoral or nostalgic "gaze" on his subjects that appears to reference the neo-Romantic movement.

Interestingly enough, Shute's efforts at composing landscapes are almost subverted by the changes in island life and industry. While attempting to hearken back to mid-century America, the actual photographs serve as evidence of the changes in the island's economy, social relations, and physical landscape of the island. After his father's death in 1877, Richard G. Shute continued working with paper photography until his own death in 1923.

Most of the images in the exhibit date between 1870 to the turn of the century. The images convey the island's topography, its communities, and its industry. The exhibition serves as a visual narrative that begins with Gay Head and concludes with Vineyard Haven. The images that follow represent digital surrogates of photographic prints of the Richard G. Shute glass plates. The collection contains approximately 500 images and glass plate negatives and positives, ca. 1870-1899 and is housed at the Martha's Vineyard Historical Society's Gale Huntington Library of History.

*** Note to Viewer: The images displayed in this exhibit were drawn from existing MVHS prints and not taken from the original glass plate negatives. It is important to note that these prints had been "cropped" by a technician and may not fully reflect Shute's artistic vision. Nevertheless, the chosen images in the exhibit do strongly convey Shute's efforts to document the island.

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