Musée Magazine: Drawn to the Light

By Eloise King-Clements
August 17, 2023
This review appears in Musée Magazine.

Leah and Her Father from the series At Twelve. 1983 - 1985, gelatin silver print, 10 3/8 x 13 inches, Promised Gift from the Judy Glickman Lauder Collection. © Sally Mann

Two women hold each other in morning sunlight, blond curls glide down a bare back nestled between thin arms. The photographer, Kate Carter, gently probes the surface veneer of womanhood through delicate black and white photographs. Four of her images, made between 1978 and 1979, are included in the Portland Museum of Art’s show Drawn to the Light. If you’ve never heard of Kate Carter, do not fear, neither had Anjuli Lebowitz, the inaugural Judy Glickman Lauder Associate Curator of Photography at the PMA. Carter remained widely unknown for her short life, as she tragically passed away in a car accident at 38, but despite her lack of recognition, she had a resounding impact on the photography of the late 20th century. Carter was one of the first teachers at Maine Media Workshops + College—a small but mighty artists school in Rockport, Maine. The vitality of her soft, domestic images, and her teaching at Maine Media, influenced the work of photographers like Joyce Tenneson and Judy Glickman Lauder, all of whom hang together in the same echoey room. Drawn to the Light is in celebration of the Maine Media’s 50th anniversary and is displaying a selection of work from faculty and students since the school’s creation in 1973. It’s an equal split of household names like Mary Ellen Mark and Larry Fink, and figures like Kate Carter and the school’s founder, David Lyman, who revered photography as a fine art. The show reveals the untold stories of stewards and students, the shadowed innovation, and the profound impact a small school in Rockport, Maine has had on photography. 

Windswept, 1992/ 1994. Gelatin silver print, 13 5/8 x 10 1/2 inches. Gift of the artist in memory of Jean-Pierre Sudre for the Ernst Haas Memorial Collection

While the show is littered with swelling oceans and pine trees, the photographers venture outside of Maine, too: Duane Michals to New York, Arnold Newman shoots Andrew Wyeth in Pennsylvania, Rodney Smith to France, Mary Ellen Mark to California, Sam Abel to Russia. The show for Lebowitz, co-curated with Elizabeth Greenberg, was about initiating conversations. The inclusion of Melissa Shook’s portraits was a happy coincidence—Lebowitz had admired her work for some time, before discovering Shook had taught at Maine Media, and Lebowitz was able to acquire four of her self portraits for the show. Stories like these crop up throughout the exhibit, as the roster of photographers to pass through Maine Media is surprisingly extensive. Shook’s intimate portraits hang across from Arno Rafael Minkkinen, a monumental landscape of his bare torso curving into crystal water. Together, the proximity initiates a whispered conversation about body and place. Then, there is Allison Smith, who attended the workshops as a high schooler. Her salient photograph Tiggie’s Truck (2007), is a glossy red door panel, draws from the works of color photographs like Ernst Haas and Jay Maisel, whose photo Blue Wall with Doves hangs inches away on the same wall. 

Old Man and Deanna, 1986. Silver-dye bleach print, 14 x 10 15/16 inches. Gift of the artist for the Ernst Haas Memorial Collection. © Joyce Tenneson

Drawn to the Light makes non-fiction photography, fiction. Passengers on the ferry to Vinalhaven resemble a spaceship orbiting the galaxies, the lines from under the hood of the ferry ominously shooting toward the passengers. Through a mustard thick sunlight, a square of cement is cut by the curving edge of a swimming pool with jagged shadows piercing the wintery haze. Sharon Fox and Christopher James court novelty in familiar settings. 

As the show tells the story of 50 years of photography, fittingly they included alternative photographic processes. A striking portrait of a woman by Elizabeth Opalenik, entitled Windswept, uses the mordançage process—a technique that lifts the blacks from the paper, degrading the print—to coax the gray shadows out of the frame, like lace emerging from the figure’s skin. Mirroring this texture, John Paul Caponigro’s turquoise and coral patterned image, rather than windswept, depicts heavenly ripples that brings an abstraction to the curation. 

Three Men With Shears No.1, Reims, France, 1997. gelatin silver print, 10 9/16 x 13 inches. Gift of Leslie Smolan. © Rodney Smith.

Drawn to the Light is one of many shows the museum has done in partnership with artists residencies. Over the phone, Mark Bessire, the museum director, cheerfully describes the choice to partner with Maine Media as a “no-brainer,” recalling the success of other shows they’ve done with artist residencies and workshops (their show In the Vanguard with Haystack Mountain School of Crafts comes to mind). Photography has become a major priority for them. “It’s really crucial to be in front of photography because it’s changing so fast,” he says. And luckily, their three year curatorial cycle leaves room for flexibility. As a sidebar, he recalls Alex Katz donating nine full-figure wedding dress paintings that they had eight months to prepare for a show. It’s gifts like this, that they have flexibility for. And, their most monumental donation yet has been Judy Glickman Lauder’s collection they received in 2022. Suddenly, it put them “on another level, in terms of people wanting to work with us, borrow from us and share collections,” Bessire says of the some 600 photographs Glickman Lauder gave them. Now, she can help “steward them” he concludes as the benefit of receiving a donation from a living collector. 

Reflecting Stream, Redding, Connecticut, gelatin silver print mounted on board, 9 7/8 x 13 1/2 inches Promised Gift from the Judy Glickman Lauder Collection. © Paul Caponigro.

A show celebrating the last 50 years of photographic work, begs the question: what will the next 50 years bring? “It's just one more tool for photographers to use,” Lebowitz says, regarding where A.I. might take photography. “Photographs have always been met with skepticism as a mechanical media that can be reproduced over and over again. And adapting to that is just asking the questions we’ve always asked: what is the artist’s intent? What is their interest? How are artists adapting and incorporating these mediums?” 

If you look closely, Drawn to the Light, amongst other things, champions the relationship of mentor and mentee. The value of passing on knowledge and planting seeds of inspiration left to bloom in other’s work. It brings together new and old artists to resume a forgotten conversation, learn and teach anew.