Two unidentified women seated near Beauchamp Point, October 1900. Indian Island lighthouse is visible in the background (image may be reversed?). Labeled “Whitcomb and Duffy in foreground.”

Featured on PDR in the collection Theresa Babb’s Photographs of Friendship (ca. 1898)

Camden, Maine is one of two places on the East Coast “where the mountains meet the sea”, writes Barbara F. Dyer, a local historian. Photographing its harbor and hills at the turn of the twentieth century, Theresa Babb (1868–1948) recorded both the intimacies of social life and her hometown’s industrial and seafaring traditions. What stands out most about Babb’s images is how they let us glimpse into a personal world of female friendship, captured in such a way that seems both timeless and strikingly modern.