CAMDEN — Photographs by Jim Hughes of Camden will be on display at the Camden Public Library during the month of June. The show will feature Hughes’ photos of classic automobiles in Camden. 

"In 2009, shortly after my wife and I sold our Brooklyn brownstone after living there for 45 years," said Hughes who is a writer as well as a photographer, "we moved full time to our summer home in Camden, where we had always envisioned retiring. I started exploring our new home town, mostly walking main streets and back roads with an eye towards doing a photographic portrait of the place. That project is still a work in progress. But before long, a strange thing happened: I took a detour. While making the difficult but inevitable transition to digital photography from film, I discovered that in warmer months, the streets of Camden seemed to become a virtual magnet for the kinds of classic automobiles that I had always loved, but never had the means to collect for myself. Beautiful old cars seemed to be everywhere, found in unexpected places and at unpredictable times. All I had to do was look, and chase them down. So I did.”

Jim Hughes was the founding editor of the original Camera Arts magazine, for which he received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. He was formerly editor of Camera 35 and the Photography Annual, among other publications. His books include the definitive biography W. Eugene Smith: Shadow & Substance, the monograph Ernst Haas in Black and White, and The Birth of a Century: Early Color Photographs of America.

"As a writer who photographs, I think of my color prints as ‘sidewalk stories,’" he said.

A number of these visual tales will be on display in the Picker Room at the Camden Public Library during the month of June. There will be no opening reception.