Boston Globe Review: In Portland, celebrating a neighbor’s 50th anniversary

The Portland Museum of Art is doing the celebrating, and the neighbor is the Maine Media Workshops + College

BY MARK FEENEY
JUNE 29, 2023

This article appears in the Boston Globe.

PORTLAND, Maine — The Maine Media Workshops + College has a long name and longer history. It started in 1973 as the Maine Photographic Workshops, in Rockport, Maine. It’s still there, though the name change reflects how its reach has grown over the years to include film and new media.

Now year round, the Workshops originally was held just in the summer. It’s also now an accredited institution of higher learning, hence “college.” For half a century, the Workshops has brought together aspiring photographers to learn from established photographers. Some of the latter have been highly accomplished, and some of the former have gone on to become highly accomplished themselves.

The Portland Museum of Art celebrates its in-state institutional neighbor with “Drawn to the Light: 50 Years of Photography at the Maine Media Workshops + College.” The show includes almost 100 photographs from nearly 80 photographers, as well as a selection of Workshops-related publications. All the photographers have either taught at the Workshops, studied there, or both.

“Drawn to the Light” runs through Sept. 10.

Appropriately, the first photograph is from Workshops founder David Lyman. After that, things are pretty wide open. That’s as should be. The Workshops has never held to a visual party line, and the show reflects that openness to photographic theory and practice. It’s happily eclectic as regards subject matter, scale, approach, format, and, of course, sensibility. The show reaches beyond photography to cinematography, with the presence of images by Steven Fierberg and two Oscar winners, Conrad Hall and Russell Carpenter.

The curators are the PMA’s Anjuli Lebowitz and Workshops provost Elizabeth Greenberg. Greenberg has a photograph in the show, an untitled landscape. She and Lebowitz have arranged “Drawn” in five usefully porous categories — “usefully porous” meaning that the categories aren’t boxes; they’re launching pads. One, on the early days of the Workshops, is historical. The others are thematic: visual storytelling, craft and process, the human form, landscape and placemaking.

There are photographers with Maine associations — Joyce Tenneson, Judy Glickman Lauder — and even more whose only association is through the Workshops: Judy Dater, Duane Michals, Sally Mann, Jerry Uelsmann, Larry Fink. That’s an impressive roster, in variety no less than reputation.

Many of the photographers in “Drawn to the Light” were drawn to Maine. It includes views of Camden (Timothy Whelan), Rockland (Sharon Fox), Rockport (Craig Stevens), Pemaquid Point (John Sexton), Acadia (Susan G. Drinker), Portland (George A. Tice), Belfast (Berenice Abbott). Any show where Berenice Abbott is mentioned in a parenthetical is a rich show indeed.

Drawn to Maine is different from restricted to Maine. Visitors will also find Venice (Eva Rubinstein), Moscow (Sam Abell), Santa Barbara (David Burnett), or Baja California (Eliot Porter). The cinematographers roam especially far afield: Tahiti (Hall) and Bali (Carpenter).

There are portraits of Workshops teachers: Ernest Hass (Dan Budnik); Arnold Newman, with his wife, Gus; Mary Ellen Mark (Newman). That last one offers a nice visual twist: A flash of light obscures Mark’s face. There’s another Newman-related twist. “Drawn” includes a portrait by him of Andrew Wyeth. That would be an example of a Maine-related photograph, what with the painter’s long association with the state? Actually, Newman took it in the other place associated with Wyeth, Chadds Ford, Pa.

Mark has a photograph in “Drawn.” It shows a family in Los Angeles reduced to living in their car. A classic examples of black-and-white social documentary, it’s one of the finest pictures in the exhibition. The same might be said of Jay Maisel’s “Blue Wall With Doves.” Other than in quality, it could hardly be more different from Mark’s photograph. It’s in glorious color and barely qualifies as even avian documentary. That is, without the title as guide, it would be easy to overlook the two birds in it.

The chromatic vividness of the Maisel is rivaled by Barbara Goodbody’s “SUNRISE V.” Moving the camera with the shutter open, Goodbody achieved a beauteous blur. The photograph could be a color-field painting, minus any impasto. It’s one of several images in “Drawn” that flirt with abstraction — a further testament to Workshops eclecticism.

“Drawn” has a Boston-area contingent, including Constantine Manos, John Goodman, Arno Rafael Minkkinen, and the late Melissa Shook. There are four examples from the daily self-portrait series Shook took in the early ‘70s. John Paul Caponigro, who was born in Boston, has the distinction of being half of the show’s one father-son combination. Paul Caponigro has three photographs hanging: a handsome landscape, a very handsome still life, and a wonderfully spooky-looking house, in Cushing, Maine.

Let’s hear it for nonagenarians. The elder Caponigro turned 90 last December. Elliott Erwitt turns 95 on July 26. His “Florida Keys,” with its very amusing juxtaposition of a snowy egret and a similarly shaped spigot, is easily the wittiest image in the show. It also chimes, from a plumbing perspective, with Ginette Vachon’s lustrous “Faucets,” a platinum palladium print that turns the mundane into something visually luxuriant. Its size makes the image all the more jewel like. It’s just 5¼ inches by 6⅜ inches. That size and delicacy make for a very striking contrast with Charles Altschul’s robustly large “Museum of the Revolution, Havana” — another far-from-Maine subject — which is roughly 23 inches by 77 inches.

If Erwitt’s picture is funniest in show, Rodney Smith’s “Three Men With Shears No. 1, Reims France” is a formidable runner-up. The title is accurate so far as it goes. But it doesn’t go so far as to mention that the figures holding those shears wear derbies and suit coats and stand in a farm field. What exactly — or even inexactly — is going on here? It’s an image worthy of René Magritte, a man who knew a thing or three about the surreal properties of derby wearing. As it happens, the PMA has a Magritte, “The Tempest,” currently hanging elsewhere on the first floor.

DRAWN TO THE LIGHT: 50 Years of Photography at the Maine Media Workshops + College

At: Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Sq., Portland, Maine, through Sept. 10. 207-775-6148, www.portlandmuseum.org