{"id":19593,"date":"2021-06-13T11:21:54","date_gmt":"2021-06-13T15:21:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=19593"},"modified":"2021-06-13T12:30:06","modified_gmt":"2021-06-13T16:30:06","slug":"s-b-sam-walker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2021\/06\/13\/s-b-sam-walker\/","title":{"rendered":"Photographer S.B. (Sam) Walker Travels Maine For A New Look At The Old Place"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2014, photographer S.B. (Sam) Walker set out on a series of road trips to photograph the state of Maine. The results so far are featured in the exhibition \u201cNor\u2019east,\u201d on view at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art<\/a> in Rockland from May 29 to Sept. 12, 2021.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere have been a lot of people who have done projects, photographically and otherwise, in Maine,\u201d Walker told Bangor Daily News in 2019<\/a>. \u201cA lot of them have really narrow focus, and I wanted to do something that covered a large geographic area, that went across a lot of social levels.\u201d<\/p>\n

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S.B. Walker, “Harbor, Frenchboro,” 2015. (Courtesy Center for Maine Contemporary Art)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Walker, who resides in Rockland and Portland, Maine, grew up outside of Boston and visiting the East Raymond camp of his grandmother who raised sheep in South Paris, Maine. His great-great grandmother, Florence Brooks Whitehouse, was a Portland painter, writer and suffragette (and daughter-in-law of the chief justice of the Maine Supreme Court).<\/p>\n

Walker photographs in the crisp, clear, black-and-white mode of early American modernists. His images of a clapboard church in Benton and a lobster boat moored in a glassy smooth winter harbor in Frenchboro are contemporary photographs that evoke classic images of Maine village life.<\/p>\n

Even the kid in a one-room school house at Isle au Haut, leaning on a wall decorated with President\u2019s Day images of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, or the photo of children playing on a rope swing inside a barn at Wrinkle in Thyme Farm, a sheep farm in West Sumner catering to knitters and weavers, feel like contemporary updates on that familiar notion of Maine as quaint, small town, flinty, White America.<\/p>\n

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S.B. Walker, “Daughter of Somali Bantu Farmers, Lisbon Falls,” 2014. (Courtesy Center for Maine Contemporary Art)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But that notion is complicated, troubled perhaps, by Walker\u2019s photograph of the man in a bandana and cowboy hat posing with his Uncle Sam puppet leaning against his car spray painted in a camouflage pattern and his nickname, \u201cSting Ray,\u201d written on the driver\u2019s door. Or the photo of a Somali man in a sport coat picking blueberries at Union. Or men standing inside Portland\u2019s Expo Center to mark the end of Ramadan. Or the Black girl hoeing a field at Benton, whom Walker identifies as a \u201cDaughter of Somali Bantu Farmers.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a different Maine, a different America\u2014a place that still resembles those old images, but is also a place inhabited by contrasting nationalism and immigrants and people of diverse faiths.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was more a windy road, dictated by intuition, serendipity, and strange happenings,\u201d Walker says in a press release<\/a>. \u201cOver the course of the project, I\u2019ve had the privilege to spend time with 10th generation Mainers, aging back-to-the-landers, young farmers, recent immigrants, artists, ex-convicts, entrepreneurs, drag queens, affluent summer folk, fishermen, crypto-currency traders, and so on. Despite the richness of these encounters, I am left with more questions than answers. To define a time and place is in some sense an impossible task, though, as an artist, trying to articulate what cannot be described is perhaps the best kind of sport.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

If this is the kind of coverage of arts, nature, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, (hopefully) weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content \u00a9Greg Cook 2021 or the respective creators.)<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
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S.B. Walker, “Church with Jersey Barriers, Benton,” 2015. (Courtesy Center for Maine Contemporary Art)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"S.B.<\/a>
S.B. Walker, “One Room School House, Isle au Haut,” 2015. (Courtesy Center for Maine Contemporary Art)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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S.B. Walker, “Dawn, Isle au Haut,” 2015. (Courtesy Center for Maine Contemporary Art)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"S.B.<\/a>
S.B. Walker, “Wrinkle in Thyme Farm, West Sumner,” 2014. (Courtesy Center for Maine Contemporary Art)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"S.B.<\/a>
S.B. Walker, “Somali Blueberry Picker, Union,” 2014. (Courtesy Center for Maine Contemporary Art)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"S.B.<\/a>
S.B. Walker, “Pine Tree Signage, Maine,” 2014-16. (Courtesy Center for Maine Contemporary Art)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"S.B.<\/a>
S.B. Walker, “End of Ramadan, Expo Center, Portland,” 2015. (Courtesy Center for Maine Contemporary Art)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2014, photographer S.B. (Sam) Walker set out on a series of road trips to photograph the state of Maine. The results so far are featured in the exhibition \u201cNor\u2019east,\u201d on view at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland from May 29 to Sept. 12, 2021. \u201cThere have been a lot of people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19597,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[508,15],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19593"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19593"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19631,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19593\/revisions\/19631"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}