Are you a "towner?" Do you know one?

Local photographer Bob Hubert is asking town residents to recommend people who live or work in Harvard as subjects for a "class picture" of the town which he's calling "Towners: The Harvard Portrait Project."

Over the next year, Hubert intends to create 50 black-and-white portraits to display in venues throughout the town, culminating in an exhibit of all the photos. Community art organization For Art's Sake is sponsoring the project.

Hubert came up with the idea after an impromptu portrait session during an open house for the Pilot Project at the old library. He was demonstrating an old, large studio camera and "people started sitting down and saying, 'can you take my picture,'" Hubert said. "I ended up doing about 20 portraits that day."

Sharon Chandler Correnty (Photo by Bob Hubert)

Hubert's cameras weigh hundreds of pounds; the lenses alone can be up to 16 pounds. They come from the mid-1800s through the mid-1900s, when, Hubert explained, to prevent portrait subjects from having to sit still for uncomfortably long periods of time, camera manufacturers built them huge to let a large amount of light in. The negative of each photograph is 8 by 10 inches.

"I've always been fascinated with old cameras because you can't duplicate the quality of the photo with a modern camera," Hubert said. "There's no way to duplicate the quality of an 8 by 10 negative with a digital camera…People tend to think that things improve as they get more modern, but it's always nice to remind people of what they gave up with modern progress."

Hubert said he was thrilled with the results when he developed the photos he took at the Pilot Project open house. The Pilot Project hung them up at the old library and got "phenomenal comments" about them, Hubert said.

From the "pilot group" of portraits at the Pilot Project, an idea was born, an idea "to do a project that would involve the town and, in a way, help to bring the community together a little bit," Hubert said.

"If you look at these photos, these big cameras with big lenses do very detailed photographs," he said. "You can see every line in someone's face, their every aspect and expression. What I wanted to do with this project is look for faces that would respond to that kind of photography."

For the most part, Hubert intends to use a Century 10A studio camera to create the large scale portraits for the Towners project. He originally procured the camera from the closing inventory of the old general store in Harvard. Hubert writes in his artist's statement: "This beast of a camera is as tall as I am and weighs nearly as much. But the photographs I was able to produce with it were quite unique."

Hubert plans on setting up his camera at town events throughout the year. He will be updating the Towners Facebook site with information about when photo shoots will be taking place. He's asking that residents send him suggestions for subjects through the Facebook page or by emailing him at harvardtowners@gmail.com.

For his 50 subjects, Hubert's not necessarily looking for local movers and shakers, but "somebody who people know and like and who think their face should be photographed."

"I'd like people to really sell me the person, like why should they be in this project?" he said. "…Half of this project is the town's involvement, because the point of it is to get everybody to know everybody else in a different way."

For the latest information on "Towners: The Harvard Portrait Project," including studio dates, visit www.facebook.com/harvardtowners.