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“DINAH”: Among the photographs on display at the “Discovering Grant Castner” exhibit at the New Jersey State Museum February 3 through September 15 is this 1898 portrait of Dinah Hartman of Milford, mending a garment.
By Anne Levin
As a major repository for items related to fine art, culture, archaeology, and natural history, the New Jersey State Museum is often contacted by people interested in donating items they think curators might find of interest. Many of those queries are respectfully considered and politely refused.
But a phone call in July 2019 was a different matter. It was about a collection of 1,200 glass plate negatives by Grant Castner, a long-forgotten amateur photographer who lived and worked in Trenton. The call has led to the exhibit “Discovering Grant Castner: The Lost Archives of a New Jersey Photographer,” opening February 3 and running through September 15 at the museum on Trenton’s West State Street.
More than 200 photographs from the 1890s through the 1910s of everyday New Jersey residents interacting, working, and relaxing — some in frames, others in a slide show — are on display, divided into 11 categories. Included are rarely seen objects from the museum’s cultural history collection that relate to the subject matter in the photos.
“Once in a while, one of these calls really stands out and you’re thinking, ‘This is really something special,’” said Nicholas Ciotola, the museum’s curator of cultural history. “Almost always when something is donated, we tell the owner the object won’t go on display. Our role is to preserve for the future. But I knew from the moment we obtained these glass plate negatives that this would be an exhibit. The story would be compelling for people. And once I started looking at the slides, I saw the Jersey shore, Hamilton, Princeton, State Street in Trenton — all these places and things that are integral to New Jersey history.”
The collection was donated by Robert R. Jones in memory of his stepson William R. Paquin, who had discovered the negatives and died in 2018. Jones knew he had to find a home for them.
Once he got the negatives, Ciotola began looking into who Grant Castner was, and where he came from. “One of the mysteries from the beginning was where Castner’s family was, and how they fit into the story,” he said. “I did a reverse genealogy. I started with Castner and worked forward and found his only living grandson in Maryland. I reached out to him, and he invited me down and we did some genealogical research.”
Born in 1863 just north of Belvidere, Warren County, Castner died in 1941 and is buried in Trenton’s Greenwood Cemetery. He shot photographs throughout his life.
“He was a talented photographer and was clearly inspired by his contemporaries,” Ciotola said. “It was a time when photography was thriving as a new art form. He became the secretary of the Trenton Camera Club and remained an officer for many years. You can see his inspiration by Lewis Hine and Alfred Stieglitz, and their influences on his work.”
Castner, who worked as a news agent, was defined as an amateur. “He distributed to newsstands around Mercer County,” Ciotola said. “I think he got into photography because he had those journalistic sensibilities. He worked in Trenton, and he wanted to document the city as it existed at that particular time. He took pictures of people interacting at parades, at work, and things like that. His interest in journalism was certainly a factor.”
Ciotola is especially struck by a photo titled Dinah, a portrait of a woman in Milford. “He was really good at capturing portraits of people, and this one is wonderful,” he said. “She’s seated, mending. Her house is behind her, and you see her blooming plants. I think he’s sending a message that this woman, despite her age, commands respect.”
That photo came in a sleeve with Castner’s hand-written note identifying “Dinah: Milford, New Jersey,” providing a clue that allowed Ciotola to locate information about the subject. “She was actually a live-in nanny for different families in Milford,” he said. “Castner liked to travel up and down the Delaware and visit the river towns. He probably stopped in Milford on one of those trips.”
Some of the images are portraits of individuals Castner might have known well. “Their comfort with the photographer [is] apparent in their warm, familiar expressions,” reads a press release about the show. “Others are people he encountered on his travels around Trenton. He even ventured into some of the area schools and captured images of children at play and at their desks. Castner also photographed the African American community in New Jersey; a number of those photographs are included in the exhibition.”
The photographer’s images of workers are also important. “He was documenting industries that, in some instances, are long gone,” Ciotola said. “One is Lacy’s Shad Fisheries. It [shad fishing] continues to be a tradition today, but back then it was huge, an important food source. The picture shows the human reflections in the water, and two boats with counterbalanced angles. It shows Castner’s journalistic sensibilities.”
The exhibit also includes Castner’s views of the railroad industry. One shot, of men working on a locomotive wheel, “gives a really great feel of Trenton at the time,” Ciotola said. “That is an example of the influence of Lewis Hine.”
A self-portrait of Castner has him standing under the bridge at Stony Brook in Princeton, “an example of what he called his rambles in nature,” Ciotola said. “So, in addition to the industrial scenes and people, he also enjoyed New Jersey nature. He took beautiful landscapes. So, he is very diverse in what he is documenting.”
Ciotola hopes the exhibit might lead to additional discoveries about Castner and the era he documented. “We’re hoping people might see somebody they recognize in these photos, and that will allow us to learn even more,” he said. “We want to show him as an artist, but we’re also using the prints to show stories about New Jersey history.”
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