Between cleaning darkrooms, sifting through emails and phone calls, and pecking away at a seemingly endless to do list, Joshua Farr, Gallery Manager at the Vermont Center for Photography finds time to make daily guests and visitors his attention’s priority. “I greet them and let them peruse”, he says. “This usually spurs hours of conversations on anything from where the best framing shop in town is, to what my favorite brand of 35mm film is – it’s sort of a hub for general photo enthusiast, some who’ve been working in the field for decades, and many who have yet to formally pick up the camera.”
Farr, who graduated with a BFA in photography from the New Hampshire Institute of Art in 2011, has been managing the gallery at the Vermont Center of Photography in Brattleboro since the fall of 2011. Only weeks prior to discovering the opportunity, he was working at a farm in New Hampshire. After long days of weeding or tending livestock he pursued listings for jobs on Craigslist. What followed was a result of happenstance and “go-for-it” determination. “I knew I was moving [to Vermont] in a matter of weeks and had not yet found a job,” he says. “I just happened to stumble across a posting for a Gallery Manager at a small photography gallery in Brattleboro and got instantly excited. I was a bit nervous because I had never had a job as a manager or director, but I needed this job!”
Although Farr works closely with 10 volunteer board members and meets with them on a monthly basis, he is the sole employee of the not-for-profit organization, which was founded in 1998. This means his list of responsibilities, which he describes with the enthusiasm of someone who truly loves their job, is all encompassing. He manages fundraising to cleaning darkrooms, social media to events, and everything in between. “Working in a gallery is definitely a roller coaster of duties, sometimes very computer oriented, yet other times quite physically demanding”, he says. “The nice part,” he adds, “is that each of the Board members has something they tend to focus on regularly”, such as finances, IT, fundraising and even maintenance. This in return helps Farr with balancing as much as he does and focusing on bigger projects.
One of those bigger projects is VCP’s monthly, rotating exhibitions. This is where Farr invests a great deal of his energy and where much of VCP’s mission and focus is centered. It’s no surprise then that with his level of energy and passion, Farr throws so much of himself into the process and leaves out not a single detail – even when the turnaround is as quick as it is. The VCP also hosts open portfolio nights every third Thursday of the month which Josh attends and has found to be, in combination with his own self-motivation, an invaluable tool.
When asked what advice he has for recent graduates that may think they lack experience or qualifications to pursue certain jobs, Farr recalls, “When I applied for the Gallery Director position, I was sitting in a mud-caked farm camper with my laptop and a candle as my only source of light browsing through Craigslist ads. I figured, ‘there’s got to be someone out there applying for it that’s far more qualified than myself’.”
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