[ Music plays ] Ciotola: Grant Castner's photographs really tell a story of everyday life in New Jersey in the period from 1880 to the 1920s.

Narrator: At the New Jersey State Museum, a sprawling exhibition of photographs by Trenton resident Grant Castner is a window to a world long gone.

In 2019, Nick Ciotola, the cultural history curator for the museum, got a call from a potential donor.

Ciotola: I immediately called him back because this was one of those collections that initially sound very intriguing and very interesting because he said they were glass plate negatives and they were about New Jersey history.

I was able to go and look at the collection in a storage locker in Hunterdon County, and I picked up one of the glass plate negatives, and I saw that it was an image of Trenton over 100 years ago, in the early 1900s.

The image was filled with modern transportation for that time period.

One image, one glass plate negative, one photograph by Grant Castner really encapsulated that time period, that story of New Jersey history, that turn of the 20th century urbanization and modernization and transportation history that was going on.

So, I realized right away that this was a special collection.

It was a collection that we would want to preserve here at the New Jersey State Museum for future generations.

And over the past five years, we've been researching and interpreting the collection.

And now it will culminate in the exhibition "Discovering Grant Castner: The Lost Archive of a New Jersey Photographer."

Narrator: Archivist and photographer Gary Saretzky provided expertise about the photographic techniques current during Castner's time.

Saretzky: Grant Castner lived from 1863, during the Civil War -- born during the Civil War -- and he died in 1941, just as World War II was starting.

He spanned that period, and at the beginning of that period, photography employed primarily the collodion process, also known as the wet plate process.

It was very tedious.

Narrator: Wet plate, or collodion, photography is complicated.

It requires long exposure times and ready access to a darkroom.

Saretzky: So, photographers who worked outside, they would have wagons with them, darkroom wagons, and they would go in and out of the wagon, you know, and it took a long time to make a picture.

So, there weren't a whole lot of amateurs working in the collodion era, which lasted until 1880.

Narrator: And then came the invention of the gelatin dry plate glass negative.

Saretzky: Those negatives, those gelatin dry plate negatives, as they were called, came ready to use, right out of the box.

This one says extremely rapid dry plate, very sensitive to light.

Narrator: It was a revolution, and the popularity of photography soared.

Magazines showcased the best work and new techniques, and every city had its camera club.

After Grant Castner moved to the boomtown of Trenton, he became part of the scene.

Saretzky: There's a picture of him with a bicycle, and you can see on the bicycle, there's a box that's strapped to the bicycle, and that's where he probably had his glass plate negatives, were in that box.

Narrator: The prints that Grant Castner made are gone.

But his negatives, unlike so many others made at the time, will now be preserved for future generations.

The clarity of his glass plate negatives show a long-vanished world in amazing detail.

Saretzky: Grant Castner was one of the first citizens of Trenton to go up into the top of the Trenton Battle Monument.

At one time, there was an elevator that took the public up to the top.

You could go to a viewing platform, and Grant Castner was one of the first Trentonians to do that.

He brought his camera with him.

Trenton was booming at that time period.

It was transitioning from a smaller city of 30,000 individuals to a city of nearly 200,000 individuals.

It was a time period when the railroads, the Pennsylvania Railroad, was coming into Trenton.

It was a time when automobiles were starting to roam the streets of Trenton, and it was a time period when streetcars ran all through the city of Trenton and connected the outskirts of Trenton to the city.

And Grant Castner captured and documented all of that at a time when Trenton was booming.

Narrator: Grant Castner was observing the world around him and creating carefully composed, thoughtful images.

He cared about aesthetics.

Through photography magazines and camera clubs, he was aware of and emulated great photographers working at the time, including Lewis Hine, the social crusader, and Alfred Stieglitz, the gallery owner and, later, husband of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Ciotola: Castner is a contemporary of the great photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and Stieglitz was a member of the so-called Photo-Secession, the group that really thought that photography could be an art form and should be considered an art form.

Narrator: Grant Castner's photographs from Trenton's heyday show a world that was vibrant and full of change, and they show the faces of the people who lived in and made that world.

Ciotola: One of Grant Castner's great talents was his ability to photograph people, and I believe that he genuinely enjoyed people.

The personalities of the individuals who he photographs come across in some of these photographs that he took.

Part of that is because he didn't invite strangers into his house to take studio portraits of them.

He actually traveled out into his community, whether it was Trenton or farther afield in Mercer County, even up to Warren County, to take pictures of people in their own environments.

Naturally, that made them much more comfortable having the presence of a photographer.

Saretzky: For me, a lot of the fascination is the quality of the work is so high.

A good sense of style, a good sense of composition, and an awareness of light.

Mostly, it's all natural-light photography, and you have to know where the light's coming from, if you want to make a good photo.

So, I think the quality of the work is really what's going to make people love this show.

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