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Over the last few years, Michael Alpert has logged 100,000 miles on his car, most of it in Maine.
He’s not a salesman, an insurance claims adjuster or a delivery driver. He’s an artist, and the state’s hidden quarries, forgotten farmhouses and old-fashioned Main Streets are his muse, luring him from Gilead to Lubec, from Van Buren to Eliot.
“I’m really trying to be surprised,” Alpert, 58, said over coffee at a Bangor eatery. “I try to look at the landscape as though I’m in Nepal or Thailand in the sense of an exotic landscape. At the same time, it’s very familiar to me, but I want to be surprised.”
The resulting black and white photographs, on view through Dec. 19 at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, feel like little discoveries. In the book and exhibition that share the title “A Maine Portfolio,” the mundane becomes novel, but at the same time, the images feel as old as the land and as comfortable as a worn chair.
“He clearly doesn’t want these to be seen just as Maine images,” CMCA curator Bruce Brown said recently. “He’s found images that could be many places. They don’t say, ‘This is Maine,’ but of course it is Maine. A good photograph, like a good painting, kind of transcends its time and place.”
These aren’t picture postcards from Vacationland. In one photograph, a dilapidated farmhouse slumps beside a maple tree about to unfurl its leaves. In another, a sluice of water surges from a Skowhegan dam. A modern-day diner on Van Buren’s main street, with a sign in its window that reads “Accepting food stamps,” evokes an earlier time, another place. Only one image, a shot of Moxie Falls, is a standard view, and that’s because there’s only one possible vantage point.
“In general, what I’m trying to do is see Maine with a resident’s view, not from a tourist’s eye,” Alpert said. “Even though I try to make it exotic, I want the culture to be evident.”
Alpert, a Bangor native, knows Maine’s culture intimately, and photography has deepened his interest in “lived experience.” He doesn’t turn his lens to cliched lobsterboats and lighthouses. Instead, he sees the beauty in a battered farmhouse, an abandoned factory.
“I’m interested in buildings that show a human presence, even if they’re unoccupied,” Alpert said. “Those marks of experience I see as exceedingly beautiful.”
Though he left Maine as a young man to study philosophy and literature at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, the state’s unique landscape lured him back. When he returned to his hometown, he set up a studio and worked for years as a book artist. In the 1990s, he became director of the University of Maine Press, where he continues to edit and design books.
Though his interest in photography dates back to his teenage years, he “never did anything about it until recently.” A heart attack in 1999 caused him to rethink his priorities, but photography didn’t come into play until the day his son Theodore moved to California. Before he left, Theodore pulled a medium-format Rollerflex camera out of his bag and asked his father first to pose for a portrait and then take a picture of him.
“I knew right at that moment that I was going to do this,” Alpert recalled. “I told him I was going to buy one of those cameras and it was as though I had found a friend. It was really startling to me how comfortable I was with that camera.”
He has no regrets about trading one art form for another. Years of working alone in his studio left him feeling restricted, but photography allowed him to engage with his subjects and the world around him.
“With book arts, I always felt I needed to explain what I was doing,” Alpert said. “With photos, I feel that they can be out on their own and do their own explaining.”
There’s a philosophical bent to his work, as well. When he describes his subjects and their varying stages of dilapidation, Alpert describes the Greek concepts of chronos (a chronological measure) and kairos, a more abstract idea of the passage of time. He speaks of existentialism, and the interplay of shadow and light.
Alpert is a quiet, pensive man. He speaks eloquently, insightfully, in a manner that reflects his academic background, his love for books and his curiosity about life. But when the subject of photography arises, intellect gives way to feeling.
“I am tremendously happy when I’m out in the field taking photographs,” Alpert said. “I really feel as though I have some contact with the inner life of others. That brings me tremendous joy. The other source of fulfillment is that I feel with these photographs I don’t have to push very hard before doors open. Many people seem ready to accept the photographs as meaningful. That is unique in my experience.”
Brown, the curator at CMCA, was so impressed when he saw Alpert’s contemplative photographs in the “Skowhegan at 50” faculty show that he asked him to have a solo exhibit. That was three years ago. Alpert spent the meantime making pictures for “A Maine Portfolio.” He would not be rushed.
Brown says it was worth the wait.
“With a few exceptions, good artists have good minds, frequently the better the mind, the better the art,” Brown said. “There has to be some real intelligence behind things and Michael Alpert fits the bill in that case. He has a good mind and a good sensitivity about the world around him.”
Photography didn’t change Alpert’s view of Maine. He has long had an appreciation for the battle of man vs. nature that takes place in Maine’s unforgiving climate. Instead, it deepened his understanding of the people and places that make the state unique.
“Maine is more varied, more strangely beautiful than I realized,” he said.
Michael Alpert: “A Maine Portfolio”
Where: Center for Maine Contemporary Art,
162 Russell Ave., Rockport
When: 10 a.m.- 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 1- 5 p.m. Sunday, through Dec. 19
Admission: $3 for nonmembers, free for members
Information: 236-2875 or www.artsmaine.org
Concurrent shows:
?on LINE? and ?Subtle Geometries?
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