PORTLAND, Maine — June’s clammy, water-logged weather wasn’t very conducive to enjoying the state’s fabled summertime outdoor attractions. The forecast for July’s first week isn’t much better.

Looks like it’s time for plan B — but don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be a hardship. 

Instead of fretting about drizzling skies, let the wet weather drive you indoors to the climate-controlled confines of Maine’s first-rate museums currently offering a dazzling array of world-class photography exhibitions.

Right now, Maine is blessed with three major shows featuring broad surveys of prints by heavy-hitting shooters as well as lesser-known artists. In addition, smaller, more niche shows dot the Pine Tree State as well, offering something for just about everyone.

Bowdoin College of Art

People Watching: Contemporary Photography Since 1965

This wide-ranging, and free, exhibition is all about humans and the various ways photographers have been picturing them since the middle of the 20th century. The show is broken up into four distinct sections, showcasing 120 photographs by more than four dozen photographers.

The first section features street photography and begins with prints by superstars of the craft Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand and Bruce Davidson. These are mostly observed pictures of people on city streets who didn’t know they were being photographed.

These photos capture rectangular instants of unguarded time and then allow the viewer the luxury of contemplating that particular fraction of a second for as long as they like. The photos transform blank, anonymous moments into something almost — but not quite — knowable.

Two remarkable photos by American Indian photographer Zig Jackson are also part of the first section. Both large, black-and-white images show white tourists photographing Indigenous dancers at what looks like a public powwow. Jackson described each palindromic photo as, “Indian photographing tourist photographing Indian.”

The second section at the Bowdoin exhibition is dedicated to pictures of people at home. Most of the images were made by someone with a familiar, or intimate, relationship with their subjects. Included is a family picture by Sally Mann and a pair of prints from Larry Clark’s well-known book about drug use and sex in the 1960s, “Tulsa.”

There’s also a heart-stopping series of six prints picturing domestic violence in progress, shot in the 1980s by Donna Ferrato. They remind viewers that not all private moments at home are beautiful.

The second section also includes a handful of prints by Maine artist Olive Pierce who spent years lovingly documenting a marginalized family in Bremen, which culminated in her classic photo book “Up River: The Story of a Maine Fishing Community.”

The third and fourth sections’ images are less powerful and focus on studio portraiture and finally pictures of landscapes and interiors that hint of past human occupation. Standouts here are a series of Polaroids by Andy Warhol and a remarkable photo of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis’ lined hand by Irving Penn. 

The show runs through Nov. 5.

Portland Museum of Art

Drawn to the Light: 50 years of Photography at Maine Media Workshops + College

This show highlights 100 prints by 75 photographic artists associated with Rockport’s famous photo school since it was founded half a century ago in 1973 by David Lyman.

National Geographic shooter Dick Durrance, color photography pioneer Ernst Haas, documentarian Mary Ellen Mark and gauzy artist Joyce Tenneson are just a few of the well-known names represented in the show.

By bringing out the big guns, the show seeks to attract a wide audience, of course, but also show the outsized, cross-pollinating impact the little Maine school has had on the photographic world over the years. 

Near the beginning of the show is a stunning and famous print by Mary Ellen Mark picturing the Damm family, arms around each other, in the 1971 Buick Skylark that was their home when the photographer made her picture in the 1980s. Just down the wall from that image is a portrait of Mark, taken in Rockport by equally famous shooter Arnold Newman in 1993. 

Likewise, not far from a trippy print of glass buildings reflected in other skyscraping windows by Ernst Haas, is a playful portrait of the photographer. Taken in 1959 by Dan Budnik, it shows Haas lying in the mud, clad in a rain slicker, trying to get a shot of a leaf floating in a mud puddle.

Another arresting image is by French photographer Madeleine de Sinety, taken in Portland in 1995. The playful photo shows an oiled and bikini-clad woman trying to look glamorous and get a tan while laying on a tattered lawn chair outside a city tenement building. Children run past her on the sidewalk but she still manages to look relatively serene. 

The crowd-pleasing show also surveys work by magazine reportage artists Sam Abell, Peter Ralston and William Albert Allard, landscapes by Robert Glenn Ketchum and Paul Caponigro as well as a few arty nudes.

A delightful addition to the show is a small selection of historic Maine Media Workshops course catalogs — which prospective students used to get in the mail during the winter and spend hours pouring over, like department store Christmas wish books. But instead of dreaming of December gifts, photographers would dream of meeting famous shooters during magic summers in Rockport.

The show runs through Sept. 10.

University of New England Art Museum, Portland campus

Rose Marasco: Camera Lucida

This photographic exhibition is completely different from the other two biggies going on in Maine right now. It features the deeply personal, idiosyncratic work of a single Maine photographer but it packs no less of a punch.

Rose Marasco, born in upstate New York, helped found the photography program at the University of Southern Maine and then taught there for 35 years. During her teaching career, she also found time to make her own photographs and mount 25 solo shows at prestigious venues including the Houston Center for Photography, Universite de Bretagne Occidentale in Brest, France, and the Farnsworth Museum of Art.

The large University of New England show coincides with the publication of Marasco’s monograph “At Home,” by OSMOS Books.

Every single photo in the show, which is grouped into distinct series, is a carefully constructed image with nothing left to chance. Most are draped with several layers of visual interest and meaning. 

Marasco made one large collection of photographs by projecting various images and pictures into curated rooms inside her own house. The resulting eyeball feasts can fascinate for minutes at a time, as a viewer’s brain attempts to catalog everything it can see.

Another series features seemingly artifice-free pictures of small, historic artifacts she unearthed in the backyard of her Portland home. Marasco couples these photographs with dreamy, written narratives.

Also in the show are a series of images from her “Domestic Objects” series, which Marasco worked on for nearly a decade between 1993 and 2002. In the images, she combines historic diary pages, written by long-dead, everyday Maine women, with domestic objects inspired by the diary entries.   

In one such image called “Egg Diary” the artist couples a single egg with a diary page, on top of what looks like a classic, mid-century formica table top.

“Dorothy Clak came to buy one egg — the only fresh one we had,” reads the entry in part.

It was jotted down in neat cursive script by East Madison’s Florence Burrill Jacobs on Jan. 15, 1921. Jacobs’ papers are part of the University of New England’s Maine Women Writers Collection.

Marasco’s show runs through Oct. 8.

More photography to see in Maine right now

The Maine Museum of Photographic arts in Portland is currently showing “Decoding the Domestic,” featuring various works centering around how an artist’s home environment influences their work.

The Maine Maritime Museum in Bath is now featuring photographic works by pioneering Maine women photographers Emma D. Sewall, Josephine Ginn Banks and Abbie F. Minott. All three were descended from shipbuilding and seafaring families and captured images of Maine landscapes, industries, and communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Penobscot Marine Museum has three photographic shows of note this summer. One focuses on Maine-built boats created especially for summer rusticators. Another exhibit hones in on historic magazine photos of fisherfolk from the pages of National Fisherman and its predecessor Atlantic Fisherman. The third show is all about the work of Maine photographer Sam Murfitt who has spent most of his life connected with the water — making photographs, building boats and working for fishing publications.

ARTE, fidèle partenaire des Rencontres d’Arles, propose une projection en lien avec l’une des expositions de la programmation des Rencontres d’Arles 2023, La Casa Susanna. Dans les années 50-60, au milieu d’une vaste campagne américaine, une petite maison en bois a abrité le premier réseau clandestin de travestis. Diane et Kate ont aujourd’hui 80 ans. À l’époque, elles étaient des hommes. Elles nous racontent cette histoire presque effacée, à une époque…

The outback of Australia has long been altered by human hands, and today there’s a real romanticism in what generations before us have left behind in small towns all across the country.

Far from the glossy tourist sites, there’s a seemingly forgotten Australia just waiting to be explored and in and around these places, and a wealth of photographic opportunities as well.

So last year, while on a month-long road trip through outback New South Wales, I decided to focus my lens on the man-made and altered landscapes I found on my travels.

I enjoyed this so much it inspired a new creative pathway and became the centre of a personal project I called West of Somewhere East – a photographic exploration of the urban environment in small town Australia.

Before we get started on some of my learnings from photographing these places, it’s worth having a quick history lesson.

Back in 1975, a huge change occurred in landscape photography circles in America with the launch of an exhibition in New York called New Topographics: Photographs of a Man Altered Landscape.

As well as introducing to the world photographers such as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke and others, the exhibition had a lasting impact on aesthetic and conceptual approaches to American landscape photography.

Before the exhibition, landscape photography was traditionally produced to showcase the pristine, seemingly untouched wilderness, such as the kind of magnificent “American” views championed by photographers like Ansel Adams.

By comparison, the New Topographic movement focused on man-altered topography, the suburbanised and elemental environment which is often overlooked and mundane to most people. In legitimising these places as worthy of attention, it opened new realms of possibilities for photographers to explore.

So, what’s the subject?

Unsurprisingly, most peoples’ idea of landscape photography is likely to be what’s found in a natural setting, free of man-made elements. But with New Topographic photography the key is to look for the opposite.

The genre is a celebration of the often quirky beauty found in everyday objects and places – think nostalgic objects in old service stations, empty parking lots full of shopping trolleys, urban parks and playgrounds, and other ‘monotonous’ places.

For me, what I like about this style of photography is it’s a reminder that not everything has to be a postcard moment for it to be photo worthy. Sometimes the quiet and unexpected can make for strong imagery.

Shot list

Whenever I start a new project, I’ll begin the process by writing a list with certain shots I want to make. So, before my trip, I wrote a list and stuck it to my steering wheel as a visual reminder of what I wanted to capture as I travelled.

I pre-visualised scenes and gave some thought to the different atmospheres and moods I wanted to capture. Being an Australian trip, my list had things you might expect like ‘outback pub’, ‘roadhouse’, ‘holden ute’, ‘roadkill’, ‘dark skies’, ‘outdated interiors’, ‘red dirt’, ‘long straight road’, and ‘hills hoist clothesline’.

I made a similar list when I visited the NSW town of Guyra during winter earlier in the year. Here, I had ‘tyre tracks in the snow’, ‘bowling green covered in snow’, ‘night scenes in the snow’, ‘window reflection’, and ‘shop window glowing in the evening’, among others.

I mention this because having these lists makes it so much easier to move around and find suitable subjects when you arrive in a location. It gives a sense of structure and direction that can save many hours aimlessly wandering while searching for subjects.

Don’t get me wrong, being aimless is great fun too, but often not when you’re travelling, and time is short. I recommend you give it a shot next time you head out to shoot a series. 

Composition

Centred, ‘matter of fact’ style framing, flat horizontal and straight vertical lines are all hallmarks of New Topographic photography. Composition is everything and what you exclude from your frame is just as important as what you include.

A technique I like to use is to ‘build’ the frame up from a clear focal point – once you’ve identified your main subject, compose your shot carefully by considering if everything in the frame is necessary to the final product.

Sometimes simply moving further away to include more within the frame is enough, while other times you may need to alter the angle at which you hold the camera, all while being aware you need to allow space to obtain straight vertical or horizontal lines. A tripod can be useful here.

Juxtaposition is another element that can help tell a story. Combining the natural and the man-made into one image can be powerful, and you’ll see this in much of my work. Not only can the combination provide scale and interest, but it can also provide a subtle commentary on how humans interact with our environment.

Low contrast

One of the characteristics of the New Topographic movement is repetitious lighting and relatively low contrast. I think part of this is to do with the fact that these earlier masterpieces were shot on black and white film or colour negative film. As a result, bold bright colours and high contrast are out, and images generally have a very soft or passive feel to them.

This low contrast style also plays to the subjects – often they’re not flashy or ostentatious, and so don’t need to be photographed in such a way. Subtlety is the aim.

Look out for part two next week. 

About the author: Drew Hopper is an Australian freelance documentary photographer exploring ecological themes, landscape and place. He is committed to documenting social, cultural and environmental stories around the world. See more of his work at drewhopper.com.

I have heard many different questions from those interested in photography, from staples such as “What is the best camera” to more obscure inquiries, such as “Is photography dying?” For some reason, the question in this article’s title caught me more off guard than most.

As someone who has worked for himself for a decade, I have a number of irons in a number of fires; it’s simply good practice for survival when you have to generate your own money. As a result, I have certain tools at my disposal that help guide me when it comes to trending topics and questions. One such tool is AnswerSocrates.com, where you can see trending searches on whatever topic you choose, in whichever country you choose. I have never used it for photography content, funnily enough, but out of curiosity, I checked what the most common questions are for the topic. I expected to see questions about the best cameras, lenses, and bags, as well as basics such as “What is ISO?” and “What are the best camera settings?” The latter is an all-time favorite of mine. It’s tantamount to asking what is the best medicine!

This turned out not to be the case, but it wasn’t far off either. Many of the different questions were familiar, such as “can photography be a career,” “when was photography invented,” and “should photography be considered art,” but one stuck in my throat as I mouthed it.

‘Can I Learn Photography on My Own?’

Perhaps it’s oversensitivity on my part, but I love this question. I imagine many trolls would give sharp responses to it, but they are forgetting that many haven’t grown up with Google in their pocket. In fact, the question reminded me of a gentleman with whom I had a similar conversation to the one I would have with people asking this question. I’ll call him John for the sake of this brief anecdote.

I am a friend of John’s son, and upon his son getting married, I was asked if I’d shoot the wedding as they wanted someone they could trust, and it wouldn’t be a conventional wedding. John was in his 70s and his wife, at some juncture, told me that he had just picked up a camera for the first time and was loving it, but he had no idea of how to learn what to do. He wasn’t tech-savvy, he didn’t use the internet, and books seemed to be outdated or light on useful information. Eventually, I spoke to John about photography, and he asked a similar question to the one on Answer Socrates: he wanted to know if it was possible to learn the craft on his own.

Now, in the case of someone who doesn’t use the internet and isn’t tech-minded, it’s more of a challenge, but it isn’t necessarily an obvious path for those who live on the internet either. John had an information drought when it came to photography, but the digital natives have information overload. Where do you get the best information? How do you know it’s reliable? Can you truly get to a reasonable standard on your own? Without the internet, you will need either better books than John could find, or relinquish the “on my own” part in favor of photography clubs or tutoring. Or, you find someone who can use the internet on your behalf.

But, yes, you absolutely can learn photography on your own. Digital content is of a standard these days that you could become a leading photographer completely solo, and with the combination of YouTube, websites like Fstoppers, and paid tutorials, you have everything you need. I want to underpin all of the following by saying that you ought to be shooting as much as possible and experimenting while you’re at it. Do not be afraid to miss or fail — that’s the only way you will make any progress.

The order of play for teaching yourself photography ought to be starting with the foundations. The twin pillars of getting off the ground are the fundamentals of photography and understanding your camera. When it comes to the fundamentals of photography, there are nearly more resources than there are cameras; learn about the exposure triangle, and you’re mostly set. In my early days, I printed it out and put it in my camera bag.

Understanding your own camera is just as easy to do. Let’s say you buy a second-hand Sony a7 III (no affiliation, it was just a camera I bought and used for years), you will need to learn how to set it up for your use, which buttons do what, where settings are in the menu system, and so on. The manual is one way of doing it, sure, but I would recommend heading over to YouTube and typing “Sony a7 III beginner’s guide” or words to that effect. This will result in brilliant tutorials like this one by Sidney Diongzon.

Once you’re able to take pictures, you need to figure out what sort of images you want to create. No matter what genre motivated you to try photography (mine was macro), I implore you to shoot anything and everything and see what you enjoy. If you wanted to try your hand at landscape, for instance, you can follow the same pattern as above and search YouTube for something akin to “Beginner’s guide to landscape photography” and look for a popular video. I would recommend Mads Peter Iversen’s entry on that first page.

Now, there’s a supplementary point I’d like to add here. Depending on how you define “on my own,” you can accelerate your progress. When I read “on my own,” I imagine that to mean without formal education or a one-on-one tutor. In which case, you should join photography communities or groups. From Reddit, to 500px, to Discord servers, there are myriad photography groups that provide useful feedback on images as well as inspiration from other photographers. For me, this was a sub-forum on a car website, but it had me engaging with photographers far above my station.

To push forward from a solid foundation, you have the choice of investing in the skill or taking the potentially longer path of trial and error. The amount of free content is staggering, and the caliber of some of it is marvelous, so it’s feasible to reach a high standard without anything paid, but the best tutorials tend to cost. The Fstoppers tutorial library is proven, and I have watched many of them, so can speak to the standard, although given where I write this, you’re welcome to get a second opinion!

Final Thoughts

To me and many others who have been around the space a while, the question “can I learn photography on my own” seems to have an obvious answer, but that evidently isn’t the case for everyone. So, if you are interested in photography and are wondering if you need some formal training to be proficient at the craft: no, you do not.

If you taught yourself photography, share in the comments some tips for those who might be curious about dipping a toe in these waters, but are intimidated to do so without in-person guidance.

Melbourne photographer and multi-disciplinary artist Chris Bowes has won the $25,000 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize for 2023.

He describes his winning series Sun Kissed #1, #2, #3, #4 as a series of experimental photographs created using a hand-made camera that, rather than capturing a representational image, instead captures the colour of light.

“They are presented in pairs, each pair containing an imprint of the light at sunrise and sunset over the course of several days. As such, the work’s aim is to reduce landscape photography to its most basic form, imbuing photographic film with an impression of the sun rather than capturing it washing over the environment.”

Run by the Australian Photographic Society (APS), The Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize is an acquisitive prize that seeks to find Australia’s best conceptual photographs. Entries in the Award must be a still work that has been substantially produced by photographic means, and it is open to analogue and digital photography, collage and mixed media. 

In addition to taking home the $25k prize money, Bowes’ series will be acquired and join the previous MCPP winners in the Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre’s (MRAC) permanent collection of post-war paintings, ceramic and photography.

The adjudicators of the competition, Victoria Cooper, Eloise Maree, Doug Spowart, and Len Metcalf, also decided that four other finalist works should be Highly Commended. They were:

The Colony Reclaims the Land by Melanie Cobham

A flying saucer over Clyde Mountain, shows Declan, dead at two hours old, how to make a new body out of light, 2023 by Judith Nangala Crispin

I Knew at the Time, 2023 by Jess Leonard, and I don’t always understand/selectively mute, 2022 by Arrayah Loynd.

All the finalists are showing until August 26 at the Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre. You can see them all here.