Book exhumes Maine junkyard gems

OWLS HEAD, by Rosamond Purcell, The Quantuck Lane Press, New York, 2003, 240 pages, $25.

In the summer of 1991, while teaching a class at the Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport, Boston-based photographer Rosamond Purcell took her students on a field trip along the coast, seeking material. In what turned out to be a serendipitous turn of events, the class happened upon William Buckminster’s junkyard on the road to the Owls Head lighthouse. For Purcell, whose heart starts tripping at the sight of objects in a state of decay, Buckminster’s 11 acres worth of oddments – “the most covered ground” the author had ever seen – proved to be the mother lode.

For the next 20 or so years, the smitten camera artist returned at regular intervals to explore this tumultuous terrain, uncovering new material, making purchases and seeking the penetralia of both the site and its owner. Purcell’s new book, “Owls Head,” recounts her explorations even as it highlights in a poetic and memorable manner what turns out to be a magnificent, albeit quite out-of-the-ordinary, obsession.

Purcell’s writing is consistently well-wrought and engaging. Describing Buckminster’s “all-American trash heap” early in the book, she conjures its magnitude by way of a nifty bit of hyperbole: “It was as if a magnet had dragged several hotels, a waterfront, and a whole town up or down the coast to this spot.” There is a wonderful current of wit here, too. “I had never seen such an elegant display of animal infiltration into the realm of pulp fiction,” she writes with tongue-in-cheek awe, toting off boxes of “disinterred” insect-eaten books.

Occasionally, Purcell will resort to a catalog to render Buckminster’s milieu. One such riff consists of 44 descriptors for the condition of the objects she finds, starting with “fraying, tattered, cracked, flattened” and ending with “skinned, docked, gnawed, entrenched.”

As Purcell digs deeper, her prose becomes more poetic. Gem-like passages of autobiography come to the surface, such as a childhood memory of Dorothy Parker staying with her family on Martha’s Vineyard. Her knowledge of the arcane (recalling Huysmans’ novel “La-Bas”) adds to the mix.

The figure of Buckminster slowly emerges, as if he, too, were a prize item to be uncovered from the chaotic tectonics of the property. We learn about his pool hall prowess, distaste for customers who take pity on him, love of skating, disdain for the gimmicky Andrew Wyeth, addiction to Mountain Dew -even the fact that he’s distantly related to Buckminster Fuller, the visionary architect who lived on a Maine island. Purcell paints a sympathetic portrait, drawing on transcripts of conversations, but also on her felt kinship with this master of these Down East middens.

Purcell has made a name for herself through her photographs of items found in the vaults of natural history museums here and abroad. Collections of her photographs have been published and displayed (including an exhibition at College of the Atlantic a few years ago). She collaborated on three books with the eminent evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.

The photographs in Owls Head are reproduced in black and white on coated stock in the notes section at the back. Even presented in near-miniature, these still-lifes help us appreciate Purcell’s special perspective, where the resonance of resemblance reigns supreme. The “vestigial” hammers of an exhumed typewriter, for example, truly resemble “the ribbings of an ancient echinoid,” as she calls the trinkets in the text.

An assortment of the objects collected at Buckminster’s place comprise half of the exhibition “Rosamond Purcell: Two Rooms” currently on display at the Mount Holyoke Art Museum through March 12. The other half of the installation is a recreation of 17th-century Danish physician and naturalist Olaus Worm’s “cabinet of curiosities,” which influenced another contemporary artist, the Dane John Olsen. The show also features a selection of Purcell’s photographs of the Owls Head site.

Owls Head is as much a memoir of self-discovery as it is the account of two kindred spirits meeting and bonding at a mid-coast junk heap. The premise may seem off the wall, but the premises are full of promise.

Carl Little can be reached at little@acadia.net.