book of ours - review by nan lincoln
When playwright and author Thornton Wilde wrote the play "Our Town" about the seemingly unremarkable lives of ordinary people living in an ordinary small town in America, it struck a deep and resonant chord with the public.
Because the play reminded us that there really is nothing unremarkable or ordinary about any life or any community, however small or remote.
It showed us that every person's life is noteworthy, and in some ways contributes to the multi-textured, multi-hued fabric of the community.
Photographer Sarah Butler has done very much the same thing for the extended community of Mt. Desert Island with her recently published folio-sized book, "Portrait of a Maine Island."
The 120 or so black and white photographs contained in this large, handsomely designed book tell a compelling story about this small remarkable island through the people who live, summer, and work here.
There's Ralph Stanley, who has become something of an island icon in the past decade or so as a boat builder, historian, storyteller and music maker. Butler has him seated on a wharf, with some construction project going on behind, a bemused look on his still handsome face and a pile of sawdust at his feet.
She caught the late fishmonger David Stanley sitting on a bench in downtown Northeast Harbor — everything in this black and white photo is slightly out of focus, except for Stanley's face which is animated by some story he seems to be telling her.
A lot of people probably don't know Connie Bush by name, but if you describe her dark, strong-featured face, deeply etched by age and experience, and those glittering, deep set eyes, like diamonds in a coal mine, you'll probably recognize her as someone you've seen on the streets of Bar Harbor and wondered who she was. Butler has photographed her twice, once as a character study and once in her summer home, the soft blues and whites of the elegant background making a startling contrast with Connie's almost feral features.
Raymond Stroud is another iconic MDI character, known for his Alblahd framing business, yes, but more for his ever-growing collection of Island memorabilia. Butler has caught him in his shop surrounded by some of that collection and his two sons who seem to be following the history-preserving path of their father.
She has photographed a number of artists and artisans as well. Sam Shaw, puckishly handsome even in middle-age and Sara Weeks Peabody, looking a bit like the Queen Mum on casual Friday in her comfy-looking Northeast Harbor living room. In her portrait, Northeast Harbor artist and gallery owner Thistle Brown looks both casual and supremely happy in her Wingspread gallery, which just a few months later, would be destroyed by fire along with a lifetime of her art and personal possessions.
Art dealer Sunne Savage has actually turned herself into a work of art in her colorful portrait wearing a designer dress that mirrors one of her husband Robert Neuman's large paintings in the background.
All sorts of handsome summer people in their sunny gardens and patios, with their well-groomed dogs, or in cheery living rooms, are found here too.
Various members of the Butler clan are also found in the book — her grandparents, Farnham and Gladys, and father, John, are seen at work and at home. In fact, the book is dedicated to her grandparents, whom Butler says represent, for her, the cycle of Island life.
It is curious that Butler sometimes chooses to use full names, and sometimes just a first name or even a nickname to identify the people in her photographs.
"Sometimes people asked to be anonymous," she explains. "And sometimes they are so well-known by everyone — like Thistle, for instance, or such close acquaintances of mine – that first names seemed more appropriate for what I was doing here."
And yes, while it may drive some of us batty trying to recall the full names of some of the people whose faces we recognize on these pages, on the other hand, it does lend a sort of intimacy to the book — more like a personal photo album than a coffee table book.
Interspersed throughout the book are pictures Butler has set up of charts wrapped around popple stones, blown up against a wall or post, laid out in a field and other such unexpected places.
"They're supposed to be like the cairns you find on the trails here" Butler says. "They're meant to guide the reader through the journey I'm taking them on."
It has been quite a personal journey Butler has taken to complete this ambitious endeavor of chronicling the faces of her community. For her, there were no cairns to lead the way, so the path was a bit crooked with a few dead ends and side roads.
The granddaughter of summer folk turned year-rounders, Butler grew up essentially in two worlds. A native MDI-er by birth but also with deep roots in the summer community.
While this gave her unusual access to both worlds — the fishermen, boatbuilders, shopkeepers, tradespeople and local movers and shakers, as well the social summer set who play tennis or golf at the club and have cocktails on their broad porches, she says she was never quite sure which of these worlds she belonged in.
"This book, I guess, is how I'm still working all that out."
After graduating from Mount Desert Elementary School, Butler went on to prep school at Proctor Academy in New Hampshire and then to college in Lugano, Switzerland. While there she took a few photography classes, which she took to immediately.
"I always said I was going to be a photographer after that," she says. "But I wasn't really ready to do anything about it yet. I had some traveling to do, building some life experiences."
But eventually she did come home to MDI with her 35mm camera and started taking pictures of friends and family and of herself.
"I was really interested in portraits, faces," she says, "but I was too shy to ask other people to pose so I did a lot of experimenting with self portraits."
Realizing she needed to learn more about the art of photography than she could learn in her own dark room, she attended Rockport College and then the College of Art and Design in Savannah, Ga., where she studied for 2 1/2 years.
As her knowledge about photography grew, so did Butler's courage and eventually she was able to approach the people whose portraits she wanted to capture — and the courage to insist exactly how and where she wanted to shoot them.
"I think I only got turned down flat once," she says. "And that was pretty early on when I was still pretty awkward."
Although digital photography came of age during Butler's photographic journey she still chooses to shoot in film and develops all her own images.
Eventually she had produced enough of her impressive portraits that one of her professors at Savannah was prompted to suggest she think about compiling them into a book.
She says she learned about her publisher, Gliteratti, through a Maine garden book by Barabara Stewart which she thought was particularly well produced.
While not completely a vanity press, Gliteratti is one of the newer forms of publishing houses that shares the financial risk with its author — and a book of the size and scope Butler had in mind was a considerable financial risk. Fortunately in addition to the publisher's share of the cost of producing 1,000 copies, she also found a sponsor for the book.
The big upside, in going this route, however, was having a major say in every aspect of the book's creation.
"On some things I got my way and in other's I had to compromise — but I was involved in every step of the process," she says.
It shows. "Portrait of a Maine Island" is clearly a labor of love where every detail from the choice of fonts, type size, placement of text and photos, and the order of photos themselves is clearly orchestrated with a thoughtful eye and sure hand.
The book, which is available at Sherman's now and through the publisher at www.glitteratiincorporated.com, is destined to become an important part of the Mount Desert Island historical cannon, an art treasure and, for a certain generation of Mount Desert Islanders, the definitive book that tells us all what we really want to know or remember about our town.
Review by Nan Lincoln
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