The first I heard about Base Camp Gallery’s inaugural art opening on March 31 was when I was working my way through MAINE mag’s June issue and saw the pics of the event. It was held in an old beer distribution warehouse on Presumpscot Street in Portland. Their logo for that event says “New Works from Maine’s Underground”.

Will Sears at Base Camp Gallery’s 3/31 opening©Ben DeHaan. All Rights Reserved

Will Sears, who partnered with Tessa O’Brien to launch this venture, tells me “the show was a real success” and they are planning their next gig (“an epic party”) maybe early September and maybe in another location. They emphatically distance themselves from what they seem to think the rest of the galleries in Maine are showing for the most part: tourist stuff.

Base Camp Gallery is an interesting and welcome concept – and totally ties in with my own experiences with the 20′s and 30′s generation: no long-term commitments, no roots and a “we’ll get to it when and where we get to it, people!” attitude. (My friends who are parents of this generation are practically comatose with worrying where the heck they went wrong.) Will says no date for another show has been set because he and Tessa are “pretty busy.”  As most 50-somethings since time began, I feel like I’m living on another planet than this generation, but that’s another posting on another blog because it has nothing to do with art! (But I can’t help demonstrating my point: A 64 year old friend has a 26 year old intern (no typo there) working for him this summer who has no romantic relationship, shares housing with two others, one of each sex, and has no clue what he wants from life or where he’s going. My friend, on the other hand, had a job traveling all over the world purchasing goods for a huge retail company. Married, home/mortgage and two children. All by the age of 26. Like I said: two different planets and each saying “Who ARE these people??!!”)

Erica©Ben DeHaan. All Rights Reserved

Okay  – back to the photography blog: Two photographers were included in the mix at that March 31 opening: Ben DeHaan and Colin Mathews. If you access Ben’s blog, you feel a little schizoid: there’s a ton of  lovely, scenic pictures (of Acadia!!) that tourists just might like! But here’s the picture that was at the last show (“Don’t Tell Me What To Do”)  at Susan Maasch Fine Art in May – it’s one image in an incredibly creative series of 14 works called “Like Animals”:

The Morning Paper©Ben DeHaan. All Rights Reserved

I love much of the work on Ben’s website – he fleshes out totally diverse themes and builds them over time, and that is one of the signs of a serious, mature artist to me.

Elephants©Ben DeHaan (Holga). All Rights Reserved

His different portfolios look like they are carefully edited into very strong groups of work – it’s an impressive visual trip.

Portland Harbor©Ben DeHaan. All Rights Reserved

On his blog, Ben posts a note about the March 31 opening of Base Camp Gallery and says “It was great to be a part of the space that is dedicated to sustaining the creative talent in Portland”. Um. Well…okay.

Truth be told – there are many galleries in Maine dedicated to exhibiting and selling art that has nothing to do with lobster boats – or Acadia, for that matter. I just got a notice about Aucocisco’s  provocative show “Shift” opening on tonight, June 15. The Photo National 2011, together with Thomas Hager’s cyanotypes and other historic processes works, opening June 24 at UMMA, promises to be cutting edge, and I’m counting the seconds until I get to lose myslf there. Space Gallery, and Two Point Gallery (which I think is closed) are/were always stepping out into thin air with their courageous and cutting edge events. Will Sears is right – there is more room for “edgy and experimental” here in Maine. But it’s far from a wasteland in that department.

And I think the Base Camp Gallery concept is very cool. I was just talking with Keith Fitzgerald/Zero Station the other day about how artists and groups of artists should stop waiting around for a gallery to take them on and do it themselves: grab some of the empty storefronts for First Friday Art Walks in Portland and elsewhere, and install their work and have some fun. Will Sears talks about how much they like the “pop-up gallery idea” and I do too. I hope he and Tessa O’Brien set up an notifications e-mail list SOON  about any future big one night shows – I missed discovering Ben DeHaan’s work the last time around at their March 31 event, and that’s counter-productive to their mission.  This 57 year old art dealer who hates Facebook and doesn’t hang out on Monument Square in Portland, would like to be in the loop.

146th St.©Ben DeHaan (Holga). All Rights Reserved

If you don’t subscribe, find a copy at your bookstore or order from the publishing company (805-474-6633). COLOR, and BLACK AND WHITE will be published as one magazine for four issues in the coming year, maintaining separate issues only for the competitions both magazines sponsor.

Be forewarned: try and look through this competition issue without reading the titles of the works. Why some photographers try so hard to be poets as well – and fail so spectacularly – I will never understand. And I will never stop writing about it. Some of these goofy titles made me burst out laughing, most made me simply cringe and feel embarrassed for the artist that they are soooo unable to see how how much they hurt their credibility as serious artists. (“Like a Painting”, “Waiting for His Kiss” (photo of a frog), “On Golden Pond”, “Nature’s Art”, “Hear the Roar”). Fortunately, the aberrations are few this time around – maybe word is getting out to get serious if you want to be taken seriously.

Abigail Wellman, whose image “Ingrid” graced the cover of last year’s Single Image Competition issue, and who was a winner in the recent COLOR magazine Portfolio Competition, was the top winner with Silver, Bronze and Merit Awards coming her way.

SILVER AWARD: Impressions  © Abigail Wellman. All Rights Reserved.

BRONZE AWARD: Alley © Abigail Wellman. All Rights Reserved.

MERIT AWARD: Building © Abigail Wellman. All Rights Reserved.

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Mary Woodman snagged three awards as well this year. Mary had work selected for last year’s Single Image Competition, together with numerous awards over the years from COLOR magazine’s sister publication BLACK AND WHITE.

MERIT AWARD: Causeway © Mary Woodman. All Rights Reserved.

MERIT AWARD: Poppy © Mary Woodman. All Rights Reserved.

MERIT AWARD: Cold and Fishy Eye © Mary Woodman. All Rights Reserved.

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Arla Patch, also an award-winner in previous issues, won recognition for an image from her new body of work “Sixtieth Year”:

MERIT AWARD: Sixtieth Year #6 © Arla Patch. All Rights Reserved.

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Jim Nickelson, who was won much recognition for his photographs here in Maine, had these two images selected for awards in COLOR this time around:

MERIT AWARD: September Snow © Jim Nickelson. All Rights Reserved.

MERIT AWARD: Night Wires #1 © Jim Nickelson. All Rights Reserved.

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The above four artists work hard for their work – entering competitions and juried shows in Maine and well beyond. They have regularly updated, attractive websites so people can find them and see their work. They are out working behind the camera regularly as shown by these new works reproduced above. They are not lucky. They make it happen.

Next contest is the Annual Portfolio Competition for COLOR magazine, deadline March 31, 2011.

Craig Stevens writes in the CMCA catalog for “Photographing Maine: Ten Years Later”: “The tendency in contemporary photography is to overwhelm the viewer with digital virtuosity and/or physical scale. This suite [his set of four photographs accepted into the exhibit] considers the photograph in its essential form, which is a combination of Light, Space and Time. A photograph does not need to be everything. It simply needs to be  itself.”

78 Chestnut St. © Craig Stevens. All Rights Reserved.

Maine photographer Corey Desrochers (http://cdphotographics.wordpress.com and www.cdphotographics.com) read my “Shock of the New…” posting and sent me some terrific new abstract and “augmented” photographs – these are from his blog:

The first he calls an Autumn Abstraction:

Copyright Corey Desrochers. All Rights Reserved

These next two are the first photo and his rendering of it a day or two later. I know which one gets my vote:

and it’s re-creation:

If you scroll down to the bottom of the blog, you are rewarded with this beauty:

Off Season © Corey DesRochers. All Rights Reserved.

Wow. It would take me a long time to get tired of looking at this one. Thanks, Corey, for sending your new work. Any other Maine fine art photographers working with new approaches to making pictures? Let me know!

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There is an essay by Joanna Lehan in the just rec’d issue of PHOTOGRAPH about “genres of photography”. She quotes Richard Mosse as saying “Genres are made in the same way pathways are beaten into the landscape; they are an unconscious result of collective usage.” Some artists, no doubt about it, choose instead to go by the road, and others eagerly explore the opening of the trail head and then the entire path to discover what the draw has been for those artists going before them.From Mosse’s series of US troops encamped in Saddam’s former palaces. Copyright Richard Mosse. All Rights Reserved.

Lehan also says: “Fine art and photojournalism are bleeding into each other like never before and creating the potential for rich dialogues between the heretofore polarized worlds of fine art photography and photojournalism.”

She goes on to say, “We might ascribe all this genre-busting to the evolution of our understanding of the medium itself, following the postmodern era. After flailing in death throes for decades, the myth of an objective photograph has finally died. Photographers feel freer to hold more loosely to the notion of ‘truth’, and use all tools and contexts available to make elliptical, nuanced statements about current events.”

Are photographers just messing with our brains when they create unreal reality? Are they playing god (always fun!)? But honestly, do we really even understand our own reality let alone anything else out there? And just as important, do we communicate our own reality to others totally objectively? Of course not.

I’ve always wondered at people who express adamant opinions about world events as if they really know what is actually happening out there. Such confidence results in a total loss of credibility as far as I’m concerned. We don’t have a clue what the reality of life out there is, including our own sphere of existence here in Maine. And I think photographers are bound to explore how photography is evolving and what the medium now gives them to tell us about life as they see it. If, in fact, they have anything unique to say.

Lehan concludes with, “And if the grammar of photojournalism is morphing, it raises critical questions about the representation of real-world events, and how we perceive them. While it’s not important to slap a label on various kinds of lens-based imagery, it is important to be cognizant of the visual language used in the images that tell us the important stories of our time, whether in news sources or on gallery walls.”

Maine photographers: tell your story in your own words – in whatever language or combination of languages you want to tell it. But do not be afraid of that trail head or we will all suffer for it.

Each week FOCUSMAINE.COM introduces a different Maine fine art photographer and offers the first 50 collectors the rare opportunity to purchase a digital print of their work for $50.  Other sizes and editions will also be offered until sold out.  FOCUSMAINE.COM is honored to introduce ROSE MARASCO and her work as our first featured Maine fine art photographer.

ROSE MARASCO is the epitome of what makes the Maine photographic community so vibrant. She is fearless in her drive to discover enlightening combinations of photographic processes and takes risks to achieve her desired results. As a university professor, she has been inspiring photography students for over three decades and was recently named Distinguished Professor of Art by the University of Southern Maine.

To learn more about the artist and what inspired her to create this photograph – and to purchase a print, or to sign up for our e-mail list to receive first notice of each new edition, go now to www.focusmaine.com.

Almost 500 photographers from around the world submitted 9,000 images to this competition and Maine stakes a pretty darn good place in the portfolios selected. Honored are C.E. Morse, Barbara Goodbody, Mary Woodman and Abigail Wellman.

Abigail Wellman of Portland won big again with one of 15 coveted Excellence Awards. A four page spread celebrates 5 of her images. Abigail recently won a top award in COLOR’s Single Image Competition and one of two images selected for recognition by the magazine was selected for the cover of that Competition’s issue. She is represented exclusively by VoxPhotographs. Here is one of the images in the current issue:

Shadow Girl © Abigail Wellman. All Rights Reserved.

C.(Christopher)E.Morse of Cumberland was also selected for the Excellence Award honor. Eight terrific images from his “Abstract” and “Boshin” series are featured in his four page spread. It’s been a good summer for Chris – he tells me his work is featured in two New England shows this year as well.

Debro 115, Deer Brook, Maine © C.E. Morse. All Rights Reserved.

Next up is VoxPhotographs artist Mary Woodman. Mary lives in Kennebunkport and is a frequent and longtime winner in Black and White magazine, the sister publication to COLOR magazine. This time around her “Sunset/Sunrise” series was chosen for the honor of a Merit Award in the Portfolio Competition issue.

Sunrise Over Bagaduce, Castine, Maine © Mary Woodman. All Rights Reserved.

Barbara Goodbody of Cumberland Foreside was a guest photographer at VoxPhotographs last fall and her “Sunrise” series is a winner. Penobscot Bay is her subject. Barbara was awarded a Merit Award and four of her series of nine images are reproduced in COLOR. Pretty exciting. Barbara is a newcomer to the fine art photography scene in Maine.

Sunrise VI © Barbara Goodbody. All Rights Reserved.

Fine art photographers from Finland to New Mexico to Australia are honored in this Portfolio Competition. And Maine holds its own and then some. Congratulations to these four winners – winners in every sense of the word.

Maine Media Workshops has always had a low-profile presence in Maine. And yet people come from all over the globe to attend classes with world-renowned photographers. What gives? It’s time MMW takes a leadership role in defining Maine’s own fine art photography community and this new gallery could be a terrific launching pad.

With Rockport’s  CMCA (Center for Maine Contemporary Art) ready to move forward once again under the leadership of Director Suzette McAvoy, the midcoast could become a real center for Maine’s huge, but impossibly scattered and unconnected, fine art photography community. Could MMW be the home or jumping off point for a Maine Fine Art Photography Association and opens its doors and connections to enable Maine’s own community of world-class photographers to become a powerful, organized community within the larger population of Maine’s artistic citizens? I think it could. And I think it’s time.

M. Bernard, I’le St. Louis, Paris, 1999 © Peter Turnley. All Rights Reserved.

The new MMW gallery kicks off with an exhibit of photojournalist Peter Turnley’s work – read the press release here. It mentions the role the gallery hopes to play in the revitalization of Rockport Village itself. There is a new restaurant on the street level in the building called “Shepherd’s Pie” and I bet it will become an important player in that goal as well. By the way the restaurant’s phone number is not yet listed with Directory Assistance and it will be a big help to you if I give it to you: 207-236-8500. It was not easy to get this information!!

The opening reception for Turnley and the gallery is Tuesday, June 8 from 6:30 – 8. Let’s hope it’s the beginning of something vital for Maine’s own photographic artists as well as the world’s.

This week, five stellar fine art photographers joined me for supper. Every other month I offer a “salon” evening in my Portland condo for a small group of Maine’s fine art photographers to try and recreate the days when people actually talked to each other face-to-face about something they were all passionate about – art, literature, music or philosophy.

For me, it’s all about fine art photography and there’s nothing I’d rather spend the evening doing than talking about it with the people in Maine who are actually making the photographs.

This time around I brought together Melonie Bennett, Felice Boucher, Rose Marasco, Jack Montgomery and Denise Froehlich, pictured in this order above. Each artist carted a sample of their work to the gallery and in this picture all five samples can be seen on the walls.

The fine art photography community in Maine needs to strengthen its impact and one way to do this is to make sure these artists know each other, learn from each other and move forward together to make an impact on the world’s art scene. At these salons the photographers who gather are so hungry for connection no introductions are necessary. Surrounded by their work in an intimate little group show, they dive right in getting to know each other and discussing the images on the wall.

So, what’s in it for me? Frankly – there needs to be a cohesive  fine art photography community in order for there to be a fine art photography market in Maine, so building the market also involves building the community. Without a community, there’s nothing to build visibility for. And I’m determined to do just that. I talk to the artists about creating dynamic websites, entering competitions, getting their work OUT THERE and supporting it non-stop including NOT donating work when requested by endless organizations that assume art is free and artists live by air alone. Demand to be paid and paid properly for your decades of shooting and level of expertise. I talk to them about culling their work for the very best pictures they can offer so we can build a fine art photography community that is second to none in this country. Trust me, the talent in this state is world-class. So let’s take it to the world.

So the three hours we spent around the dinner table talking about photography in general and these photographers’ work specifically is worth its weight in gold – for us all.

Getting connected – building a market. Getting visibility, selling fine art photographs. There’s a process here and the future is today.

He just got back from his third trip to New Zealand – he calls the country “an addiction” and I heartily agree after my month there in January. His photographs will convince you of it in a heartbeat.

He took up my challenge of sharing his New Zealand photographs with the rest of us and they definitely put my own, posted here a month or so ago, firmly in the snapshot category! My favorite is one titled “Castle Hill” – Freddy said at a public lecture last fall that this is a “shot-of-a-lifetime” -  the sun hit this ancient monument just as he was driving to the site and was still 5 miles away. He nabbed it on the spot. I saw it on a big screen and it is a heart-stopping image of ancient boulders.

Castle Hill © Freddy Silva

Tongariro © Freddy Silva

Aspiring © Freddy Silva
Tongariro © Freddy Silva

Topeka © Freddy Silva

After a month in New Zealand I felt ready to get back to Maine and back to work. I have to admit I felt a tug on my heartstrings when I saw Freddy’s pictures. They made me know for certain I’d be going back.

Nude Youth Playing the Pipe (1910) • F. Holland Day

But when you review Jack’s website there is no doubt the work is all his. He has two major portfolios featured on the site: Genderwork, and Coming of age at the turn of the century. Frankly, there are many, many phenomenal images there.

But let’s step back. In 2008, Susan Maasch Fine Art in Portland included Jack’s work in a show titled “Gender Through the Artist’s Eyes”. I hadn’t met Jack yet, but had heard about him – “local attorney making REALLY weird photographs, etc…” and the gallery was crowded at the opening night we attended. But I saw something incredible there that night – one of the most poignant, tender portraits I had ever seen, and I don’t say that lightly. It has haunted me ever since.

Cindy 2004, Boston © 2004 Jack Montgomery. All rights reserved.

Yep, it’s a guy in that vinyl dress. But as I studied this photograph I felt that all of mankind’s struggles through the ages were summed up here, in this one image. At the same time, I was stunned by the artist’s success in capturing this one person’s own deeply and quite painfully personal story. A perfect and powerful photograph that needed no written support or explanation (people: STOP writing about your photographs, please!). This photograph writes its own book.

When I ran into Jack last week during First Friday at Susan Maasch Fine Art, I was delighted to hear he has a show opening there in April. He’s working on a nearly complete video. He’s a busy man: he’s on the board of Maine Media Workshops, and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. He also serves the Portland Museum of Art as a member of the Photography Advisory Committee. Did I mention he’s an attorney (Bernstein, Shur, Sawyer & Nelson)? But he very obviously goes somewhere deeply aesthetic and far away from all of this when he’s taking pictures.

I loved reading about Jack’s childhood in his artist’s statement – how his mother wove her family history for him in a hardscrabble tapestry. The Arthur Schopenhauer quote- “And so it is that in our childhood years the foundation is laid of our later view of the world, and there with as well of its superficiality or depth: it will be in later years unfolded and fulfilled, not essentially changed.“  supports Jack’s strong sense of time and place that very clearly influences his work, especially the new series Coming of age at the turn of the century.

Rosie and Jay © Jack Montgomery. All rights reserved.

Molly and Lucky © Jack Montgomery. All rights reserved.

Katie in the Pond © Jack Montgomer. All rights reserved.

Sebastian at Morse Mountain Beach © Jack Montgomery

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It just about kills me not to reproduce every image on Jack’s website here in this blog posting, but that’s a good problem. Log on to his website and take the time to thoughtfully review the two collections. It will be the most rewarding thing you do this week.

If you stepped inside the recent exhibit at the University of New England “Going Forward, Looking Back – Practicing Historic Photographic Proceses in the 21st Century” you know that your heartbeat picked up immediately. Who knew so much incredible work was going on in New England studios? The exhibit stimulated a huge interest in historic processes – exactly what it was designed to do – and many viewers and artists returned again and again to study the works.

In fact the demand to understand these processes was so great that the Bakery Collective in Westbrook took action of its own. Coming up are the three remaining courses taught by highly accomplished Maine artists and you need to sign up and get your hands dirty. (Wet Collodion with Keliy Anderson-Staley was held Feb. 20-21, but will repeat May 8/9 and Pinhole Photography with Jack Nordby took place 2/27)

Mt. Mitchell © David Wolfe, 2009 (10″x16″)

On March 20, you can spend the day with VoxPhotographs artist David Wolfe to learn how platinum/palladium prints are made and make one yourself. David has had two shows at VoxPhotographs. He operates Wolfe Editions in Portland. He knows what he is doing.

Disembark © David Wolfe, 2007 (8″x10″)

Then on April 3, Brenton Hamilton will give you an opportunity to learn about cyan and bichromate prints. Brenton has been a fixture at the Maine Media Workshops for 20 years and in fact, the “Going Forward, Looking Back…” exhibit ends up there this fall after two venues in MA. At MMW the exhibit opens on October 22, 5-8.

Poet of Levitation © Brenton Hamilton

Brenton is a renaissance man. He was a guest artist at VoxPhotographs in October 2008 and the show was edgy, brilliant and totally original.

There’s no guarantee early May will be hospitable either, so plan on spending May 8 and 9 learning about Wet Collodion with Keliy Anderson-Staley.

Tintype © Keliy Anderson-Staley

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One of the best things Maine has going for it (besides September) is how many opportunities there are to learn about photography and meet the shakers and  movers of it all. So, if you live here and have to put up with our miserable spring, you deserve to give yourself total relief at the Bakery Collective workshops.