Cunningham Brothers Collection

Like many practitioners of folk photography, Frank and Bert Cunningham have become posthumous documentarians of a vanished world. They were born a few years apart shortly after the Civil War ended [1865] in the village of Washington, Maine, part of the Midcoast area. Midcoast Maine consists mostly of small towns and villages, which at this time were farming communities, sparsely served by passenger rail and connected by dirt roads. The people they live among were both self-reliant and interdependent. The bucolic appeal of the area, then as now, drew city folk to summer here and helped boost the rural economy through tourism.

Although Bert moved on to vocations other than photography after the death of his wife Mabel (whose sister Ellen married Frank), the brothers formed a creative and business partnership for a while around the turn of the century, traversing a familiar sweep of a few hundred miles of countryside by horse and buggy to capture whatever scenes of daily life—work, home, celebration, recreation—appealed to their customers. Their glass plates, which sometimes began as unique, commissioned images, were often used subsequently to print postcards and cabinet cards for a wider market. At this time, photography remained a fairly technical skill; photographs were still enticing and special objects to most people.

LB2013.18.155