Dartmouth Blues

With commencement only a few days away, we happened to stumble upon some images of a past graduation ceremony inside an alum's personal photograph album. Charles L. Hildreth was a member of the class of 1901 who grew up in Westford, Massachusetts. After graduating from Dartmouth College, he attended Harvard Law School and became a practicing attorney in Lowell, Massachusetts, for many years before dying there at the age of eighty-eight.

What makes Hildreth's photographs truly remarkable is not merely the
crispness of the images, but also that they are all cyanotypes. A cyanotype is an image made by employing a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print; engineering blueprints are probably the most familiar example of the process. We have a few examples of these fascinating images here at Rauner, and Hildreth's are some of the best of them. The image of men and women wearing their turn-of-the-century finest while crowded near the stump of the Old Pine, for example, is a fascinating look into the fashion of the time. It's hard to believe that they were wearing so many layers at that time of year.

Another image, one of my favorites, shows a group of people gathered in front of Dartmouth Hall with Rollins Chapel in the background. On the steps of Dartmouth Hall, initially unremarkable, stands what appears to be a studio camera, complete with black hood for the photographer to hide behind. While two men fuss with the camera, the crowd listens to an orator perform. These are only two of the many remarkable cyanotypes from the album; there are also some fantastic images of the bonfire tower, both before and after being set ablaze. To turn the pages of Hildreth's book, come to Dartmouth and ask to see Iconography 1574.