OMNIBUS reporters seek truth SALT’s way

SALT OMNIBUS 2001, published by Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, Portland, 2001, 125 pages.

Every year the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland publishes a collection of the best nonfiction writing and photography by its students. Admirers of the institute, which was founded in 1973, keenly anticipate each compendium, knowing they will learn something about Maine heretofore hidden from view or never previously recognized.

The “2001 Omnibus” exemplifies the variety of Salt fieldwork. Bush-piloting, birthing, piano repairing, baking – these are a few of the livelihoods covered this time around. In each case, writer and photographer (sometimes they are one and the same) offer the kind of in-depth portrait rarely found in mainstream media.

Salt students have always gravitated to the workplace, paying tribute to people in a pro-proletarian manner. In this collection, for example, Heather Coleman visits the B & M Baked Beans plant in Portland. Workers are shown doing morning stretches for the day’s production. Another photograph, which was chosen for the cover, shows a woman, Jessica Jensen, “on her second day of porking” at B & M, her head bent to one side, her eyes closed, her hands grasping chunks of meat. It’s a memorable study of labor.

Among the more unusual profiles is that of Nancy 3. Hoffman, one of four collectors featured in “The Song of Objects” by Jamison York and Megan Hanson. In addition to having an unusual middle name, Ms. Hoffman has developed a museum devoted to umbrella covers – yup, you read it right, those stuff sacks that bumbershoots (British for umbrella) are kept in when not in use. Magnificent or not, this obsession is presented in the best documentary fashion despite its inherent Dave Barry appeal.

Conflict is often the center of a Salt story. Perhaps the best example this time around is the territorial war waged in Denmark, Maine, by animal rights activists, Marie St. George, and her neighbor, avid hunter Phil Richardson. Rebecca and Olivia Goldfine cover this dispute about taking sides. They also highlight a statewide issue, that of new landowners versus free roaming hunters.

Another pressing topic of concern in present-day Maine is how we welcome refugees. A study of the Somali community in Portland by B. Lacey Andrews and Anne-Marie McReynolds sheds light on issues of adaptation, accommodation and alienation.

In trademark Salt style, the writers record the actual speech of their interviewees with all the local color that comes with unfiltered language. Having recently added a documentary radio component to its core offerings, Salt can now present the actual voices (several interviews have aired on Maine Public Radio ).

Salt photographers are purists of the sort, obliged, one assumes, to produce black-and-white prints in an age of color photography and digital technology. One expects truth in the field of documentary studies, and black and white would appear to be the most direct means of representing reality in an unmanipulated manner – no digitally inserted figures or messed-with skylines. Colorization is not spoken here.

Great photos often require minimal text, as is the case in a story on domestic violence by Kate Lapides. Among many images of victims is a photograph of the corner of a room where Martha Stewart’s face on the television is juxtaposed with a book lying on a bedside table, the title of which we can read – “Next Time, She’ll Be Dead: Battering and How to Stop It.” This picture tells more than a thousand words.

Life in Maine presents a million challenges and just as many stories. Perhaps the most moving in this collection is David Lee’s portrait of Adam Murphy of Wells, an art student whose cocaine overdose left him a quadriplegic. Lee ends up collaborating with Murphy on the project, encouraging him to make his own images. Without resorting to sentiment, Lee manages to bring out the human in human interest.

Salt will be shifting to a twice-a-year magazine publication schedule. As far as this reviewer is concerned, that means more Maine truth of the engaging kind, and he looks forward to seeing, reading and hearing it.