In the first July of the pandemic, Andy Gagne, who regularly reports for this magazine, found himself in possession of a rare commodity for a Maine-based photographer in the summer months: free time. He and his now-fiancée, Sarah Kearsley, both certified sea kayaking guides who have worked for Rippleffect, packed up their gear and shoved off from Naskeag Point in Brooklin. They spent the next seven days on the Maine Island Trail Association (MITA) trail exploring and camping the breathtaking archipelago between Stonington and Isle au Haut known as Merchant Row, which features 11 Maine Coast Heritage Trust island preserves, finishing up the trip in Blue Hill Bay with views of Mount Desert Island and Acadia National Park. “It turned out to be a really unique adventure because, as you can see, we experienced every type of weather throughout the time we were out there,” says Gagne. From rough seas and thunderstorms providing little visibility to calm bluebird days when Kearsley and Gagne were able to paddle 10 to 20 miles at a stretch, the mood for their escape from reality became one of complete mindfulness. “On the ocean, the weather is so much more extreme and always changing,” says Gagne. “This tells that story—how you never really know what to expect. It really helps you appreciate those beautiful sunny moments. It was a trip in July, and yet I was thinking, ‘Man, I would really like my puff jacket.’” In other words, the old adage rings true: if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute. Gagne and Kearsley now live in western Maine, where much of their time is spent exploring the mountains and rivers, but they always look forward to packing up their sea kayaks and reconnecting with the coast.

• 
  Going Sea Kayaking? Pack Some Layers.
• 
  Documenting Acadia’s Farthest Reaching Campground
• 
  Snapshots from a Surfboard
• 
  Capturing Five Years of Family Vacations on Maine’s Coast
• 
  The Life of a Mudding Photographer

The post Going Sea Kayaking? Pack Some Layers. appeared first on The Maine Mag.

On an early August morning, I waited in downtown Stonington for the mailboat to Isle au Haut with an 85-liter hiking bag and a cooler full of beer. An island six miles out to sea, Isle au Haut has a longtime reputation as a quiet summer retreat for New England’s wealthy families. That’s just one part of Isle au Haut’s story, though; I was here for a very different reason. At the southern tip of the island—far beyond where electricity and running water end—is a small outpost of Acadia National Park with one of the National Park Service’s most diminutive campgrounds: Duck Harbor. Gifted to the Park Service in the 1940s by one of Isle au Haut’s most successful lobstering families, the protected federal land encompasses about half of the island and is managed for hiking and exploring. Duck Harbor Campground has five lean-tos, a few outhouses, a woodshed, a ranger station four miles away by foot, and a stately wharf for the mailboat to drop off day hikers and campers alike. I made my way through a field densely packed with raspberries, ferns, and the last whisper of burnt-out sweet peas to my lean-to, which was nestled into a low hill surrounded by conifers and salty wind. I set up camp and hit the trails: off to explore and capture Acadia’s most far-flung outpost.

Read More:

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  Going Sea Kayaking? Pack Some Layers.
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  Documenting Acadia’s Farthest Reaching Campground
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  Snapshots from a Surfboard
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  Capturing Five Years of Family Vacations on Maine’s Coast

The post Documenting Acadia’s Farthest Reaching Campground appeared first on The Maine Mag.

A few winters ago, photographer Gabe Bornstein decided on a whim to explore the mouth of the Nonesuch River in Scarborough’s Pine Point. He donned his hooded winter wetsuit, took his camera encased in a waterproof housing and paddled out on his eight-foot surfboard. “As a surfer and photographer particularly interested in immersing myself in the ocean and surrounding environments, the river opened up a new personal frontier and forced me to reorient the way I had been thinking about and perceiving the ocean for my entire life,” says Bornstein, who lives in Old Orchard Beach. He began capturing fishing boats moored in Saco Bay in the wintertime and discovered that being on the board gave him a different perspective on a scene he had often seen from shore. “The dings, grit, and scuffs on each boat are vivid, and the reflection of the boats and sky on the surface of the water results in a dreamy, mirror-like plane,” he says. Once he identifies a vessel he wants to photograph, he’ll paddle past it, then slide off the board into the water and let the tide draw him back to the position from which he wants to shoot. “It usually takes quite a few snaps of the shutter to nail focus and composition, which often means paddling back into position and having another go at it,” Bornstein says. “I’ll carry on like this until I start losing feeling in my fingers, at which point it’s time to head home.” With so many variables to contend with, it often takes around two hours to get a single, perfect shot. “My life and my photography revolve in great part around the coast of Maine and the oceans at large,” Bornstein says. “Exploring estuaries like this, where the Nonesuch River meets the Atlantic Ocean, scratches the constant itch I have to be in the water, while hopefully giving both Mainers and those from away a glimpse into one tiny sliver of the state.”

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  Shifting Dynamics Through the Power of Theater

The post Snapshots from a Surfboard appeared first on The Maine Mag.

In the first cold days of January 2014, photographer Ian MacLellan snapped a few shots, liked what he saw, and strung the images together on his website, photo-journal style. He enjoyed the process, the documentation. “I didn’t resolve on December 31 that I would start doing a photo a day,” MacLellan says. “I’m just someone who’s always walking around checking out nooks and crannies and taking pictures.” Eight years later the photographer and filmmaker, who has done editorial and commercial work for the likes of L.L.Bean, Trust for Public Land, and the New York Times, still continues his project: one serendipitous, photo-worthy capture a day, posted to Tumblr. “It’s what keeps me going throughout the doldrums and peaks of my freelance career,” he says, “and motivates me to roll out of bed for sunrises and race out the door for sunsets.” MacLellan lives in Maine, so within the mix there are, of course, beautiful skies, rainbows, and lighthouses. Most of his posts are the in-between moments, however. This series of images is a selection from five years’ worth of August trips MacLellan has taken with his wife’s family to Sagadahoc Bay in Georgetown. In his daily life, the photographer rock climbs and surfs; on his vacations he climbs mountains. But these trips to Georgetown are the antithesis of those activities. “We move furniture to the screened porch, do puzzles, read, cook. No one gets dressed up. There’s no agenda,” he says. The vacations’ rhythms are ruled by the tides, which bring in water deep enough for swimming and retreat to reveal a half-mile-wide mudflat. “As the tides shift and the water moves, every moment feels temporary, which is always happening, but it’s more pronounced when you have nothing else to do.”

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The post Capturing Five Years of Family Vacations on Maine’s Coast appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Every June through September, photographer Brooke Adams spends one weekend a month covered in high-visibility gear and a thick layer of mud while huge rigs, frequently made of parts taken piecemeal from other vehicles (think: a Toyota Tacoma body with the engine of a Chevrolet) roar past her, sometimes mere feet away. “I’ve gotten really good at timing the wave of mud that comes when they go by,” says Adams, “so that I can duck and cover to protect my camera equipment.” For the past eight years Adams and videographer Ann Steene—the two-woman team behind Twisted Sprocket Studio—have worked as the official track photographers of Northwoods Mud Run, a four-part mudding series based in Avon, a small Franklin County town that includes part of Mount Blue State Park. In that time, they’ve mastered the art of running to get the best shot (or to get out of the way) of custom-built trucks, Jeeps, and four-wheelers blasting through dirt and mud while a packed crowd of cheering spectators looks on.

The premise of mudding, or mud racing, is relatively simple: drivers in a variety of high clearance vehicles plow through mud as quickly as they can. The types of cars, engines, and tires (or, as they say in the mudding world, “boggers”) vary, and drivers can either race the “deep mud,” slogging through a four-foot-deep mud pit, “fast track,” a timed race on a dirt track, or, for the monster trucks, the obstacle course, which involves launching off a series of jumps to try to travel the farthest, much like the long jump in track and field. Unlike many high-adrenaline sports, however, there are rarely shoe-in winners in mud racing. “It all depends on the mud,” says Kerri Phillips, who runs Northwoods with her husband, Cecil, and who has been mud racing for 30 years. Depending on the dirt-to-water ratio or the point in the day that a race takes place, the consistency of the mud may be more slick or tacky, making it either easier or harder to blast through. This in turn makes every race a toss-up, and thus all the more exciting. “You really never know who is going to win.”

This ever-changing essence of mud is what got Adams hooked on photographing it. As a child growing up in East Waterboro, she was mesmerized by the textures of the natural world that she could capture with her mother’s Polaroid. “I was always taking that camera and sneaking off into the woods to take pictures, and as I got older, any time I was out in nature I was taking stills in my mind.” That passion led her to become a fine-art photographer and an artist mentor at Spindleworks, an art center and gallery for adults with disabilities in Brunswick. It was through the Independence Association—an umbrella company of Spindleworks—that she met Steene, and the two became fast friends.

Steene grew up in a mudding family in Durham and started attending mud races when she was just two weeks old. Most summer weekends throughout her childhood were spent traveling around the state with her parents, who were part of the now-defunct Maine Mud Bogging Association. While on the circuit, they raced against and eventually became friends with the Phillipses. When Steene invited Adams (who had never heard of mudding before) to go to a race with her in 2015, something clicked. Adams borrowed a digital camera from a friend and spent the day dodging around the course, excited to have found a new subject that deepened her love for photography. After she got home and began to edit the photos, she was thrilled by the new textures to play around with. Not long after, the two approached Kerri and Cecil to volunteer their time photographing Northwoods.

Covering daylong mudding events requires a lot of stamina and courage. Wrecks are common, and visibility is typically low, especially on rainy days. Adams and Steene always wear bright pink, orange, and yellow safety gear, sturdy boots (regardless of how hot it may be) so they can break into a run at any moment, and earplugs because, as Adams says, it makes it less scary if the sound is muffled. “Brooke and I are both kind of adrenaline junkies,” says Steene. “You have to be, because who would really be crazy enough to voluntarily stand in front of these 1,000-horsepower rigs to capture them?”

For the Phillipses, mudding is a passion project. Kerri and Cecil work full-time jobs during the week, as a kindergarten teacher and carpenter, respectively, but from the moment the snow melts in the spring, all their free time is spent preparing for Northwoods. Cecil builds the tracks, obstacle courses, and mud pits with his excavator in the evenings and on weekends, and Kerri works to get sponsors for each event. Their children, Kurt, 32, and Kyli, 14, frequently help out, and of course all of them race.

The concept of a “mud family” is prevalent in the mudding community, underlining that it’s both a family sport (as indicated by the many generations that attend and participate in races) and a place to find a chosen family. Adams and Steene consider the Phillipses to be a part of their mud family and vice versa. This winter the Twisted Sprocket team reconvened with their extended mud family to cover snowmobiling events at Northwoods, which help to tide the eager racers, spectators, and, yes, photographers, over until the spring thaw. “Everybody has different jobs and comes from different walks of life, but we all come together for this one love,” says Kerri. “The love for mud.”

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  4 Unique Winter Weekends
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The post The Life of a Mudding Photographer appeared first on The Maine Mag.

When Mark Marchesi studied photography at Maine College of Art, he focused on portraits of people. But on a series of extended road trips around the United States, Canada, and Mexico after college, he found himself taking portraits of buildings instead. He continued the practice when he returned to Portland in 2005 and has been documenting the area’s changing architectural landscape ever since. In the third volume of his Greater Portland series, published at the end of 2021, Marchesi captures how quickly Maine’s largest city has evolved in recent years. Some parts of the city documented in the book, which includes 48 carefully composed film photographs and 112 mobile phone photos taken between 2018 and last year, have already changed, including an under-construction condo in the city’s East End that is now complete and the B&M Baked Beans factory, which shut down production last year and had its smokestack removed. Most of the buildings Marchesi captures with his Linhof 4×5 field camera aren’t as iconic, but they provide the city its character, particularly when contrasted with new development. The former site of Joe’s Smoke Shop, which was torn down in 2015 and replaced with a condo building, is an example of that, Marchesi says. “It’s not a masterpiece of architecture, but it’s Portland,” he says. “It was something that defined the city. What went up in its place is one of these sort of homogenized complexes that could be the same as anywhere in the country.”

Read More:

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  Going Sea Kayaking? Pack Some Layers.
• 
  Documenting Acadia’s Farthest Reaching Campground
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  Snapshots from a Surfboard
• 
  Capturing Five Years of Family Vacations on Maine’s Coast

The post Portland’s Metamorphosis, One Picture at a Time appeared first on The Maine Mag.