Brantville

Melinda Blauvelt

1972 — USA

About this series

Inspired by Walker’s photographs, especially the remarkable portraits he made in 1936 of sharecropper families in Hale County Alabama, I bought a used 4×5 Deardorff view camera and spent the summer of 1972 in Brantville, New Brunswick Canada, small Acadian fishing village. As a volunteer with the Quebec Labrador Foundation, I ran a day camp for the local children and lived with fisherman Ulysse Thibodeau, his wife Jeannette and their three young children. When Iwasn’t making puppets or playing Capture the Flag with campers, Iwas making photographs of the Thibodeaus and their extended family and friends. They were my eager and generous collaborators whenever I set up my view camera that summer and on three more visits to Brantville.
During the pandemic, isolated from my family and friends, I revisited my Brantville negatives. My friends in Brantville were as excited as I was to see what I printed (many prints were from negatives I printed for the first time).
Stanley Barker Books (London) has published Brantville, 50 black and white photographs made between 1972 and 1974.

Photographer: Melinda Blauvelt
Nationality: American
Based in: Rhode Island, USA
Website: melindablauvelt.com
Instagram: @melindablauvelt

Melinda Blauvelt (b. 1949) earned a BA ni Art from Yale (1971) and an MFA ni Photography from Yale (1973) where she studied with Herbert Mater, Wiliam Bailey and her mentor Walker Evans.
Book: Brantville published by Stanley Barker Books 2023

Permanent Collections: Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston High Museum, Atlanta, National Portrait Galery, Washington DC Princeton University Art Museum, Yale Art Gallery, Morgan Library &Museum, The Image Centre, Toronto
Beaverbrook Art Galery, NB Canada Fralin Museum of Ar,t University of Virginia Corcoran Gallery of Art, Ayesha Selden Colection Sam Wagstaff Collection.

Group and Solo Exhibitions include the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Morgan Library &Museum (NY), the Fralin Museum at the University of Virginia, the High Museum (Atlanta), the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (Winston-Salem NC), the Wright Art Center at Beloit Colege, Harvard University Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the Virginia Museum (Richmond VA), the College of William and Mary
(Wiliamsburg VA), the Addison Galery of American Art, (Andover MA), the BJ Speed Museum (Louisville, KY), Rice University Institute for the Arts (Houston TX), Beaverbrook Art Gallery (New Brunswick, Canada), and the Brooklyn Museum