Hall, Beverly

Hall landed on Nantucket by accident. One day in 1964 her younger brother and only sibling, Gary, was on Martha’s Vineyard and asked her to deliver a tennis racket to him from their family home in Queens, New York. She took the ferry to the wrong island. Call it fate, call it destiny, call it what you will, but Beverly had happened upon her spiritual home. The following year she started the Children’s Gallery on Old South Wharf and simultaneously embarked on a career as a professional photographer, although she knew little and cared even less about the darkroom. Later,after her career was firmly established, she had a studio at the Center Street Meeting House that had no door and where her postcards came to represent the last bastion of the honor system on Nantucket—a basket was left out to collect the money.

My Nantucket, her recent book of Nantucket images, was represented with a mass of other photos as an interactive digital exhibit at the Fair Street Museum in 2010: A Passion for People: 40 Years of Nantucket Portrait Photography.