charting a course - review by oka hutchins

In her new book, "Portrait of a Maine Island," Mount Desert photographer Sarah C. Butler charts a course through the internal life of Mount Desert Island and its colorful inhabitants.

A collection of 60 original portraits and scenic photographs, the book focuses primarily on the village of Northeast Harbor, capturing its unique social and physical landscape. Through Ms. Butler's lens, viewers are taken into the living rooms, porches and patios of the island's prominent summer residents, guided through the gardens, kitchens and bedrooms of island natives, and led to the counters of its shopkeepers.

The aim of the collection is to provide an invitation into a mostly unseen world, said Ms. Butler. Her work references comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, and his notion that in myth lies the greatest internal truth, she said.

Through six years of observation and study, Ms. Butler has documented the idyllic Northeast Harbor that she experienced as a child. It was important to her to capture "the Maine that's disappearing a bit," she said. To that end, she has worked to portray her subjects from an innocent, childlike point of view and the myth of their lives.

The MDI native has a fascination with maps and charts. She grew up exploring the island's unique coastline and harbors by boat, quickly learning the ropes at her family's Mount Desert Yacht Yard. She began to develop as an artist in high school and went on to study at Rockport College and the Savannah College of Art and Design. Ms. Butler started taking pictures of people as a way to step outside herself, she said.

The path that Ms. Butler's collection charts photographically is her own, and it is one that is well worn and well loved. Her photographs capture the island's rocky coastline, its granite ledges, scruffy pines and rolling topography. Some of her images lead down Northeast Harbor's Main Street, from the quiet hub's classic architecture to the counters of its shopkeepers. In the Northeast Harbor that Ms. Butler portrays, Main Street is unmarred by the fires that leveled four prominent buildings over the last year.

Ms. Butler weaves her story through a mix of color and black-and-white images. The collection is anchored by photographs of chart-wrapped stones, which act as symbolic cairns, marking the trail through the story told. The cairns are placed on the shores of MDI as a visual reminder of the boundaries of the island, said Ms. Butler.

The book's portraits are a reflection of the dynamics of the island's seasonal community, drawing on the differences and similarities between locals and summer residents, said Ms. Butler.

After making each portrait, she spent time journaling on the experience. "It's amazing how everybody let me into their life," she said.

Noted art critic Carl Little contributed a foreword to Ms. Butler's book.

Over the course of the project she learned that "despite the outward images that we project, there really isn't much difference between us – people are people," said Ms. Butler. Although stereotypes can be true on the surface, beneath that, there is always common ground, she said.

 

Review by Oka Hutchins

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