Nancy Ottmann Albert papers

Nancy Ottmann Albert received her Bachelor's Degree from Trinity College in 1988 and her Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies from Wesleyan University in 1994.

Albert began what would become the New England mill project in August of 1981, as a solo endeavor. Largely based on her own reading and library research, she aimed "to find and photograph every extant textile mill in southern New England." Living in western Connecticut at the time, she initially photographed Connecticut area mills, eventually moving outward to the Connecticut River Valley area as well as Rhode Island. As a child, she had lived in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and this connection led her to do particularly extensive work in that location.

Throughout the next few years, Albert expanded her project to include eastern Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and southern Maine. In 1984 she enrolled as an IDP student at Trinity College in Hartford, majoring in American studies. The Individualized Degree Program offered by Trinity enrolls adults not of college age looking to continue their education. For her undergraduate thesis at Trinity, she wrote a study of the company town of North Grosvenordale, Connecticut.

For her IDP project she completed a photo exhibition of industrial landscapes in New England. She graduated from Trinity in 1988 and started work at Wesleyan's Center for the Arts the next year. At Wesleyan, she began to take classes in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program.

In 1991, she became interested in the photography of Eugene Atget, a French flaneur at the turn of the century who is often considered a documentary photography pioneer given his attempts to capture the architecture and urban landscape of Paris before it succumbed to modernity. That same year, she took her first trip to Paris, following it up with a summer semester in the city in 1992 as a part of her GLSP work.

Under the direction of architecture professor John Martin, Albert completed a thesis on Atget's photography and Paris architecture, which included an exhibition at Wesleyan's Zilkha Gallery, in 1993. The next year she received her Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies.

From 1993 to 2004, Albert worked with the Hartford Studies Project at Trinity under the direction of Susan Pennybacker and photographed Hartford neighborhoods extensively. Additionally, she curated several photographic exhibitions at the Hartford Public Library and Trinity College. In 1998, Albert revisited the Milltown project in order to document the changes of the past 15 years.

In 1999, Albert was hired by the Middletown Housing Authority to document the demolition of Long River Village, Middletown's oldest housing project. Also that year, she finished documenting the changes of milltowns and began photographing mental hospitals with Sandra Wheeler.

From 2000 to 2005, Albert worked on both solo and group exhibitions and explored roadside and vernacular architecture. In 2001, she traveled to Havana, Cuba, where she photographed street life. The next year, she started work as a photo editor for the Hog River Journal, which she continued until 2005, when she was hired by Wesleyan to document the buildings at Long Lane School prior to demolition.

In 2006, Albert moved out of New England to Charlotte, North Carolina, where she began an ongoing exploration of North Carolina historic and vernacular architecture.

In addition to the subjects described above, Albert's work includes images taken in the New England, New York state, Portugal, Spain, London, Italy, Eastern Europe, Vienna, Barcelona, Bosnia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Berlin.