Forever Young Maine photographer capitalizes on freedom and fun to capture the essence of children on film

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As a fine art photographer specializing in children’s portraits, Patrisha McLean of Camden and Castine has seen her share of youngsters in the 10-plus years she has been working in the field. Whether it’s a cherubic infant or a wide-eyed young girl, McLean seeks out the natural and…
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As a fine art photographer specializing in children’s portraits, Patrisha McLean of Camden and Castine has seen her share of youngsters in the 10-plus years she has been working in the field. Whether it’s a cherubic infant or a wide-eyed young girl, McLean seeks out the natural and the unposed. The resulting photographs bear out her vision – and her patience.

McLean’s homes serve as her studio, with many of the photo sessions taking place on the grounds of the lovely property she and her husband own in Camden. She knows where the best light is during the day – by the flower gardens, at the edge of the woods. She prefers dappled sunlight and less manicured spots where the grass is taller. “I want a child to be able to just wander,” she says. The freedom and fun are reflected in the portraits.

Never having found a way to make flash look entirely natural, McLean takes almost all of her portrait shots outdoors, between early May and mid-October when the weather is good and the flowers are blooming. Occasionally in winter she will take photos of babies indoors, by a window that offers strong northern light.

McLean knows that being photographed can be a torture for a child. She always greets her subjects with her camera around her neck, knowing from experience that some of the best pictures are taken right away. “Once or twice the child is very shy,” she recounts, “so I walk them to the frog pond, have a little chat, pick berries. The kids are here to hang out, and I just happen to be taking pictures of them.”

In preparation for the shoot, usually over the phone, McLean will ask parents not to stand behind her while she is photographing, encouraging their children to smile. “I don’t like fake smiles,” she says; “they’re the bane of what I do.”

Younger children are generally easier to photograph. They are less self-conscious and less apt to pose. “If I have a 10-year-old, sometimes it’s difficult to shoot a whole roll because they don’t have a lot of expression,” McLean notes. Teenagers are often the greatest challenge, requiring more time to get to the point of feeling at ease with the camera.

McLean recalls her most difficult shoot, a 2-year-old girl who wouldn’t sit still. “Her mother placed her on the grass and she did not stop running for an hour and a half!” The photographer has techniques to catch a child’s attention, like picking a clover or setting them in a chair, but everything failed with this particular subject. After that marathon session, McLean wound up exhausted, with only a couple of action shots that weren’t blurred.

A keen awareness of the fleeting nature of childhood drives McLean. “You get so caught up in parenting, you think the stages are going to last longer than they do,” she observes. “It could be the seven stages of children instead of the seven stages of man.” Her Web site, www.patrishamclean.com, offers a lyric by songwriter and social activist Malvina Reynolds that captures this sentiment: “Turn around and she’s one, turn around and she’s four,/turn around and she’s a young girl walking out the door.”

McLean began life north of the border, in Timmins, Ontario, and was raised in Montreal where she attended the Canadian equivalent of junior college. She eventually moved to San Francisco to pursue a career as a journalist. “Living on Snickers bars and Campbell’s Soup and working overtime” was the routine, she recalls, but she loved the challenge of coming up with features. “I always had the idea that I could walk around and pick anybody and have a wonderful story,” she recalls. Something of that approach marks some of the documentary photography she does from time to time.

McLean left reporting in her mid-20s, fed up with deadlines and the “abysmal pay.” Meeting and marrying a singer-songwriter musician, she traded coasts, landing in Castine in 1989. A year later, daughter Jackie was born. Son Wyatt came along in 1993.

It was Jackie’s arrival that inspired McLean to take up photography. She always loved the art form, but a few miscues had kept her from practicing it seriously. She tells of an unfortunate encounter with a wave at the beach and shooting a Boy Scout jamboree with an empty camera – “The staff photographer [at the paper] assumed I was going to put the film in, and I assumed he was.”

Photographing Jackie, McLean realized she needed to learn more about technique and composition. Lucky for her, the Maine Photographic Workshop was just down the road in Rockport. Her first teacher, Claudio Edinger, offered the encouragement and critical feedback necessary to set her on her way. Further courses with, among others, Mary Ellen Mark, whose work McLean has long admired, and Keith Carter, helped refine her skills. These days she gets herself revved up by attending slide shows by visiting artists at the school.

For her class with Mark, McLean needed to complete a documentary project. She wanted to photograph children. Driving around Rockland one day, she came across a group of kids playing in the street. That encounter turned into “The Children of Fulton Street,” a series of portraits remarkable for their candidness and empathy. The photos were shown at the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, the University of Maine and, most recently, in a group show at the Farnsworth Museum last spring.

Fueled by positive feedback, McLean continued to photograph her daughter – and her daughter’s friends, with parental permission. She printed some fliers offering her services and started getting calls. Her first professional photo session took place in 1994 (last year she photographed an 11-year-old whom she remembers photographing as a baby).

All of McLean’s portraits of children are in black and white. She finds that color is distracting and, for her purposes, doesn’t capture expression the way black and white does. “You notice more: a chubby hand, the translucence of the skin, texture, softness, light.” She also finds the medium “classic” and enduring. Many of the photographers McLean loves – Cecil Beaton, Julie Cameron, Diane Arbus – worked in black and white.

McLean started with a Nikon but eventually changed to a 21/4-inch negative, finding it made it easier for her clients to review the contact sheets she provides them. She prints the photos in different sizes, rarely going beyond 11 by 14 inches for the children’s portraits. She loves the tactile experience of printing her own photographs and the excitement of the image emerging out of the dark.

While she has had fun with a digital camera, McLean can’t see developing her prints on a computer and questions the archival possibilities of the new medium. Her black-and-whites are printed on fiber paper and, she claims, “will last for generations.”

Each photo shoot takes about an hour. “We start in a spot with lovely light and I let them guide,” McLean explains. A session runs $200, with additional costs for individual prints. She also does group portraits of siblings and parents with children. Most of her clients are from the midcoast area, including summer folk visiting from across the country and abroad.

McLean’s photos have been shown at a variety of venues in Maine, most recently in the children’s room at the Blue Hill Library. In addition to her portrait work, she is known for her “Flower Girl” series, which combines her “big loves,” children and flowers (some of these photographs have been made into notecards). Her pictures have been reproduced in American Photo and People and were featured on the CBS show “Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt.”

The work gained the greatest exposure when several of McLean’s “Babies in Buckets” photographs appeared on the HBO series “Sex and the City.” The particular segment featured Tatum O’Neal as a children’s photographer, with McLean’s portraits, enlarged to wall-size, representing her work.

McLean distances herself from studio portrait artists, not only because she photographs mostly outdoors and in black and white, but also by her approach to her subjects. Attending a slide talk by a children’s photographer a few years ago, she was appalled that the kids in the photos had their shoes on. “I feel that if you really love kids, you ask them to take their shoes off because their feet are so beautiful.” What is more, the lecturing photographer expressed no affinity for children. “The kicker was when she said, ‘Anyone can do it, I don’t even like kids.'”

McLean’s appreciation for the beauty of her subjects makes her job a joy. On the morning of the interview for this story she had photographed a baby. “I usually take three rolls, 90 images,” she reported, “but I had to keep shooting because she was so sweet.”

Children have a million expressions, McLean says. She is happy to be the one behind the camera recording some of them, for posterity and for pleasure.

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


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