The Nantucket Postcard

H. Marshall Gardiner was a photographer who made Nantucket his subject for over three decades, working on the island from roughly 1910 into the 1940s. Rather than relying on a national printing house, Gardiner shot and hand-tinted his own photographs, selling them locally as postcards and prints to the island's summer visitors. His body of work—later cataloged in the book H. Marshall Gardiner's Nantucket Post Cards, 1910–1940—is prized today for its softer, more painterly hand-coloring, a distinctly personal counterpoint to the mass-produced linen postcards of his era.