Taking a look at the real Maine

Maine: A Peopled Landscape Salt Documentary Photography, 1978 to 1995 Hugh T. French, editor

Since this is the season in which tourists are flocking bumper-to-bumper to quaint Maine coastal villages and seafood festivals, it is a good time to dispell the image that all Mainers live the life of Downeast Magazine and lobster feeds, sailboat cruising calendars and postcards.

In the constant discussion of the two Maines, usually it is about northern versus southern Maine. But perhaps thetwo Maines are the the haves and the have nots.

A new book gives us a good look into the lives of another Maine. It is a Maine that all Mainers know exists, but the tourists don’t unless they probe deeper than full-color coffee table books about Downeast Maine. It is a good chance for visitors to see another side of the Maine postcard, and for Mainers to be reminded who some of us are and what we do.

The Salt Center for Documentary Field Studies presents us with a chance to get more than a glimpse of some of the other Mainers who work in its deep woods, on its farms, in its canneries and agricultural fields. It also shows, without window dressing, a proud folk struggling to survive day-to day, year-to-year.

The book is a compiliation of black-and-white photos by Salt students and faculty from 1978 to the present. It shows real Mainers at work: blueberry raking Downeast and picking broccoli in the County; working in an Eastport sardine cannery or in a Lewiston textile mill; making paper in Millinocket or welding steel at Bath Iron Works.

But more than workers are examined. This documentary also offers a look at Mainers at home and with their families. Others are shown idle and drifting. Kids at play and nursing home residents are also visitied through the eye of the documentarian. Mainers, generations deep, are presented with new Mainers, be they back-to-the earthers of the 1970s or more recent Cambodian immigrants.

At the end of the book are three essays that explain documentary work and the significance of Salt’s body of images. James Curtis, University of Delaware, makes comparisons between Salt’s work and that of the Farm Service Administration of the 1930s. University of Maine history professor C. Stewart Doty examines the history of documentary photography in Maine. Finally, R. Todd Hoffman, Salt director of photography, discusses how documentary work is done at Salt.

Unfortunately, these essays are at the end of the book. Only after reading these essays can you get a good feel for what the photographers might have been trying to convey. Actually, after reading the essays, most should be curious enough to view the book again, with a fresh perspective.

The book is not without its flaws, however.

I also would like to have seen some variation in the presentation of the photographs. Each subject is given one or two photos — one photo per page. Surely some subjects or the quality work of some photographer deserve more space.

Good work should have garnered another page, or perhaps more images on two pages. This would have been possible with a variation in the page layout. A large lead photo could have been accompanied by one or two other smaller photos which would tell the reader more about the subject in the lead photo.

Weak photos or subjects should have been edited out to devote more space to the quality work by the better Salt photographers.

Another weakness is its dependence on horizontal photos. With every page you turn, you are presented with two more horizontal images and accompanying information or a quote on facing pages. The whole book has only three vertical photos by Salt photographers. And two of those, a Washington County blueberry raker and a Vietnam vet motorcyclist, are strong, quality photos. Vertical photos are an excellent way to document people and their lives, also. To me, the vertical photos stuck out amid a sea of horizontalness.