Beaumier Center Highlights Mary Jayne Hallifax’s Images

The Beaumier U.P. Heritage Center at NMU will open a brand new exhibition July 9 that options the work of one of many U.P.’s most prolific photographers. It is titled “Munising in Black & White: The Photographs of Mary Jayne Hallifax.” She was an in-demand business photographer who additionally captured quite a few candid photos of her hometown over seven a long time.

Hallifax died in 2025 on the age of 96 and donated a lot of her unique negatives to {photograph} collector Jack Deo, who’s loaning 60 photos to the Beaumier Center for the exhibit. They symbolize a tiny fragment of her catalog and focus particularly on the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, depicting group occasions, road scenes, college actions and the lives of individuals in the neighborhood. 

A lifelong Munising resident, Mary Jayne (Shampine) Hallifax was a 1946 graduate of W.G. Mather High School. While engaged on the varsity’s yearbook, she was requested by the varsity secretary to take assist develop and print images, and from that her lifelong love with images started.

After she graduated and began working, Mary Jayne spent her nights taking pictures and growing them. It turned such a ardour that she gave up her job at People’s State Bank to pursue images full time. She quickly turned Munising’s most in demand business photographer, particularly for weddings and senior pictures. However, she additionally cherished simply wandering the streets of Munising taking candid pictures of individuals and the final “goings-on” in the neighborhood. She even took pictures for the Michigan State Police crime lab.

In 1948, Mary Jayne married Richard Hallifax, and the pair labored on images collectively. He did a lot of the movie growing and press work, whereas she centered on making prints, and her portraiture studio work with households, wedding ceremony events and graduating college students. During her profession with newspaper work and even into retirement, she photographed seven Michigan governors on their journeys to Munising: G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams, John Swainson, George Romney, William Milliken, James Blanchard, John Engler and Rick Snyder. 

Up till her ninety fifth birthday, she had a weekly column “All About Town with Mary Jayne” or “Down Memory Lane in Alger County” for the Marquette Mining Journal and years earlier for the Munising News.

The exhibition can be on show by Oct. 3 on the Beaumier Center’s gallery in 223 Harden Hall at NMU. The middle’s summer season hours are midday to 4 p.m. Monday by Friday. It is free and open to the general public.