Bangor Daily News: Maine museums are overflowing with world-class photography exhibits
by Troy R. Bennett
July 5, 2023
This article appears in the Bangor Daily News.
PORTLAND, Maine — June’s clammy, water-logged weather wasn’t very conducive to enjoying the state’s fabled summertime outdoor attractions. The forecast for July’s first week isn’t much better.
Looks like it’s time for plan B — but don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be a hardship.
Instead of fretting about drizzling skies, let the wet weather drive you indoors to the climate-controlled confines of Maine’s first-rate museums currently offering a dazzling array of world-class photography exhibitions.
Right now, Maine is blessed with three major shows featuring broad surveys of prints by heavy-hitting shooters as well as lesser-known artists. In addition, smaller, more niche shows dot the Pine Tree State as well, offering something for just about everyone.
Bowdoin College of Art
People Watching: Contemporary Photography Since 1965
This wide-ranging, and free, exhibition is all about humans and the various ways photographers have been picturing them since the middle of the 20th century. The show is broken up into four distinct sections, showcasing 120 photographs by more than four dozen photographers.
The first section features street photography and begins with prints by superstars of the craft Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand and Bruce Davidson. These are mostly observed pictures of people on city streets who didn’t know they were being photographed.
These photos capture rectangular instants of unguarded time and then allow the viewer the luxury of contemplating that particular fraction of a second for as long as they like. The photos transform blank, anonymous moments into something almost — but not quite — knowable.
Two remarkable photos by American Indian photographer Zig Jackson are also part of the first section. Both large, black-and-white images show white tourists photographing Indigenous dancers at what looks like a public powwow. Jackson described each palindromic photo as, “Indian photographing tourist photographing Indian.”
The second section at the Bowdoin exhibition is dedicated to pictures of people at home. Most of the images were made by someone with a familiar, or intimate, relationship with their subjects. Included is a family picture by Sally Mann and a pair of prints from Larry Clark’s well-known book about drug use and sex in the 1960s, “Tulsa.”
There’s also a heart-stopping series of six prints picturing domestic violence in progress, shot in the 1980s by Donna Ferrato. They remind viewers that not all private moments at home are beautiful.
The second section also includes a handful of prints by Maine artist Olive Pierce who spent years lovingly documenting a marginalized family in Bremen, which culminated in her classic photo book “Up River: The Story of a Maine Fishing Community.”
The third and fourth sections’ images are less powerful and focus on studio portraiture and finally pictures of landscapes and interiors that hint of past human occupation. Standouts here are a series of Polaroids by Andy Warhol and a remarkable photo of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis’ lined hand by Irving Penn.
The show runs through Nov. 5.
Portland Museum of Art
Drawn to the Light: 50 years of Photography at Maine Media Workshops + College
This show highlights 100 prints by 75 photographic artists associated with Rockport’s famous photo school since it was founded half a century ago in 1973 by David Lyman.
National Geographic shooter Dick Durrance, color photography pioneer Ernst Haas, documentarian Mary Ellen Mark and gauzy artist Joyce Tenneson are just a few of the well-known names represented in the show.
By bringing out the big guns, the show seeks to attract a wide audience, of course, but also show the outsized, cross-pollinating impact the little Maine school has had on the photographic world over the years.
Near the beginning of the show is a stunning and famous print by Mary Ellen Mark picturing the Damm family, arms around each other, in the 1971 Buick Skylark that was their home when the photographer made her picture in the 1980s. Just down the wall from that image is a portrait of Mark, taken in Rockport by equally famous shooter Arnold Newman in 1993.
Likewise, not far from a trippy print of glass buildings reflected in other skyscraping windows by Ernst Haas, is a playful portrait of the photographer. Taken in 1959 by Dan Budnik, it shows Haas lying in the mud, clad in a rain slicker, trying to get a shot of a leaf floating in a mud puddle.
Another arresting image is by French photographer Madeleine de Sinety, taken in Portland in 1995. The playful photo shows an oiled and bikini-clad woman trying to look glamorous and get a tan while laying on a tattered lawn chair outside a city tenement building. Children run past her on the sidewalk but she still manages to look relatively serene.
The crowd-pleasing show also surveys work by magazine reportage artists Sam Abell, Peter Ralston and William Albert Allard, landscapes by Robert Glenn Ketchum and Paul Caponigro as well as a few arty nudes.
A delightful addition to the show is a small selection of historic Maine Media Workshops course catalogs — which prospective students used to get in the mail during the winter and spend hours pouring over, like department store Christmas wish books. But instead of dreaming of December gifts, photographers would dream of meeting famous shooters during magic summers in Rockport.
The show runs through Sept. 10.
University of New England Art Museum, Portland campus
This photographic exhibition is completely different from the other two biggies going on in Maine right now. It features the deeply personal, idiosyncratic work of a single Maine photographer but it packs no less of a punch.
Rose Marasco, born in upstate New York, helped found the photography program at the University of Southern Maine and then taught there for 35 years. During her teaching career, she also found time to make her own photographs and mount 25 solo shows at prestigious venues including the Houston Center for Photography, Universite de Bretagne Occidentale in Brest, France, and the Farnsworth Museum of Art.
The large University of New England show coincides with the publication of Marasco’s monograph “At Home,” by OSMOS Books.
Every single photo in the show, which is grouped into distinct series, is a carefully constructed image with nothing left to chance. Most are draped with several layers of visual interest and meaning.
Marasco made one large collection of photographs by projecting various images and pictures into curated rooms inside her own house. The resulting eyeball feasts can fascinate for minutes at a time, as a viewer’s brain attempts to catalog everything it can see.
Another series features seemingly artifice-free pictures of small, historic artifacts she unearthed in the backyard of her Portland home. Marasco couples these photographs with dreamy, written narratives.
Also in the show are a series of images from her “Domestic Objects” series, which Marasco worked on for nearly a decade between 1993 and 2002. In the images, she combines historic diary pages, written by long-dead, everyday Maine women, with domestic objects inspired by the diary entries.
In one such image called “Egg Diary” the artist couples a single egg with a diary page, on top of what looks like a classic, mid-century formica table top.
“Dorothy Clak came to buy one egg — the only fresh one we had,” reads the entry in part.
It was jotted down in neat cursive script by East Madison’s Florence Burrill Jacobs on Jan. 15, 1921. Jacobs’ papers are part of the University of New England’s Maine Women Writers Collection.
Marasco’s show runs through Oct. 8.
More photography to see in Maine right now
The Maine Museum of Photographic arts in Portland is currently showing “Decoding the Domestic,” featuring various works centering around how an artist’s home environment influences their work.
The Maine Maritime Museum in Bath is now featuring photographic works by pioneering Maine women photographers Emma D. Sewall, Josephine Ginn Banks and Abbie F. Minott. All three were descended from shipbuilding and seafaring families and captured images of Maine landscapes, industries, and communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Penobscot Marine Museum has three photographic shows of note this summer. One focuses on Maine-built boats created especially for summer rusticators. Another exhibit hones in on historic magazine photos of fisherfolk from the pages of National Fisherman and its predecessor Atlantic Fisherman. The third show is all about the work of Maine photographer Sam Murfitt who has spent most of his life connected with the water — making photographs, building boats and working for fishing publications.