A&E host captures Acadia in black and white

ACADIA: VISIONS AND VERSE, by Jack Perkins, Down East Books, Camden, 1999, 112 pages, hardcover, $25.95.

Visitors who have ever watched the honey glow of a Cadillac Mountain sunrise or gone snorkling in the deep blue waters off the Cranberry Isles might object to the idea of portraying Acadia National Park’s natural beauty in black and white.

But they don’t know Jack Perkins. The affable host of the A&E network’s “Biography” series, who lives eight months a year on tiny Bar Island off Bar Harbor, is intrigued by the possibilities, and undaunted by the imagined limitations, of black-and-white images.

Curiously, the life of the late landscape photographer Ansel Adams was not deemed worthy of an A&E profile, but Perkins is still influenced by the starkness of his work and ecstatic that a posthumous book of rare color pictures by the master bombed in bookstores.

In his introduction to “Acadia: Visions and Verse,” Perkins invokes Adams’ name. “That time with … Adams [at his home in Carmel, Calif.] planted a seed,” he writes. “Only years later did that seed finally germinate, after I had retired from daily television and moved with my wife to … Maine. There, I found both the training I needed to pursue Adams’s new/old art form and the inspiriation that made me want to do so.”

So, Perkins began lugging around bulky, tripod-mounted cameras, behind which he stood under a hood like a latter-day Matthew Brady while capturing such treasures as the hanging rock at South Bubble Mountain, asters in granite on Otter Cliffs, and the windjammer Natalie Todd framed by the fog in Frenchman Bay.

Perkins says he penned most of the poetry that accompanies his pictures after he shot the images. One exception is the curious “Damn Dam” in which he writes, “So beavers at the water gate/ Weave wondrous walls of limbs and leaves,/ While sour people derogate./ Each behaves as each believes.”

He ends the poem with his usual moralistic, spiritual take on life. In fact, the entire book sings with the work of a deeply spiritual man. (Those meeting the author-photographer at local book signings might want to bring Bibles in hand to look up the various verses he signs. My copy was penned simply “Jack Perkins, Ps. 18:14”.)

Only two photographs show people, and even in those — an off-season view of Sand Beach and a wagon ride at Jordan Pond gate — one has to search for them. But there’s nothing static about the view of Isle au Haut’s Robbinson Point lighthouse, which graces the book’s cover, or that of a church interior and other island views. Isle au Haut, along with Schoodic Point, complements Mount Desert Island land as Acadia National Park.

Anyone of lesser talent might not have pulled off publishing a $25.95 coffee-table book with a surfeit of aesthetic white space on such a well-photographed corner of New England. But Perkins does just that. Reading his poems about dewdrops and beaches and carriage rides, one can almost hear his rich broadcaster’s voice coming through loud and clear.

Next, he might drive to Fort Kent, or Lubec or Millinocket and highlight some of their natural beauty. I’d love to see what visions and verse he comes up with as he points his lens out toward Grand Manan Island off Lubec’s West Quoddy Head. Or the views of Mount Kathadin as seen from a Bowater smokestack. Care to take up the challenge, Mr. Perkins?

On Saturday, Jack Perkins will read and sign copies of “Acadia: Visions and Verse” 2 p.m. at Borders Books, Music and Cafe in Bangor, and from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. at BookStacks in Bucksport.