Messages from a small town

Published in The Post-Star (D1)
3/14/06

GLENS FALLS -- These days, some of the most interesting stories at Crandall Public Library have been etched onto silver in an alphabet of light and faces, not typed on pages.

The walls of the small basement gallery space in the library's Folklife Center are heavy with several decades worth of visual regional history, culled from a lifetime of work by the Vermont-based photographer Neil Rappaport.

Rappaport believed in the power of images to tell stories, and he believed that the stories of ordinary people are worth telling. As a self-taught documentary photographer, Rappaport spent years with some of his subjects, following them through the details of their daily lives with a clunky old view camera and an almost tangible sense of empathy.

"He was interested in documenting relationships, and he had a way of building relationships with his subjects as he did that," said his wife, Susanne, who now manages her late husband's collection.

The 62 black-and-white prints in the current exhibit give viewers a glimpse of life in Pawlet, Vt., where the Rappaports lived for 30 years. In the 1980s, Neil made it his mission to conduct a "visual census," taking photos of every Pawlet resident in settings that ranged from living rooms to dairy barns.

As a native of New York City, Rappaport was fascinated by the way his rural neighbors made a living through manual labor. The exhibit includes images from his series of photographs of workers at the Ross Valve Manufacturing Facility in Troy and the granite mines in Granville.

"Making photographs was a way of learning for him. If he could photograph it, he could understand it," explained Susanne.

The exhibit also includes five portraits of inmates at Great Meadow state prison in Comstock in the 1970s, where Rappaport volunteered to teach photography in exchange for permission to use his students as subjects.

"I think it was at the prison that he really learned how to take portraits," said Susanne.

Rappaport died suddenly of lung cancer in 1998, when he was 56. Susanne, who still lives in Pawlet, has spent the last several years sifting through the "hundreds of thousands" of prints and negatives that Neil took in his lifetime. Last year, she published a book that combines her husband's work with historical photographs of Pawlet taken by two local women in the early 20th century. The book also includes excerpts from oral histories of Pawlet residents, which Susanne recorded in collaboration with her husband's visual census project.

Susanne said her next goal is to find a permanent home for her husband's work at an institution that can preserve and maintain the collection, and hopefully use it to teach future photographers.

"Neil felt strongly about leaving a record. He believed that you had to know what had come before you in order to live your life and anticipate the future, and he saw photography as a way to do that," said Rappaport's wife, Susanne. "Photography is always about time, in one way or another."