The remarkable impact of Rockport, Maine on the field of photography.

Maine Media Workshops + College has drawn photographers to Rockport, Maine for half a century. Founded in 1973 as the Maine Photographic Workshops, it was one of the few places completely dedicated to photography as the medium sought acceptance in the realm of fine arts while also skyrocketing to importance in popular culture.  Instructors and students formed a community around their passion for the art form and its capacity for personal expression and visual storytelling. For five decades, aspiring and established creatives gathered to immerse themselves in learning new skills and techniques, critique, and stylistic developments, and to learn from both peers and mentors, such as Kate Carter, Dick Durrance, Ernst Haas, Mary Ellen Mark, Craig Stevens, and Joyce Tenneson. With around 100 works made through an array of photographic practices, this exhibition demonstrates the incredible vitality of the artists that passed through Maine and the wide influence of the workshops throughout the photographic realm.

Exhibit Date: June 16 through September 10, 2023

Hours:
Wednesday: 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Thursday: 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Friday: 10 a.m.-8 p.m. (Free admission from 4-8 p.m.)
Saturday: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. 
Sunday: 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Venue:
Portland Museum of Art
7 Congress Sq.
Portland, ME 04101

Additional Events

"Drawn to the Light" Artist Talk featuring Elizabeth Greenberg and Sean Kernan

Friday, July 28, 2023
6:00 PM to 7:00 PM
Portland Museum of Art
7 Congress Square
Portland, ME  04101

Join photographers Elizabeth Greenberg and Sean Kernan as part of an in-gallery talk series that invites artists featured in Drawn to the Light: 50 Years of Photography at Maine Media Workshops + Collage to share insights about their artistic practices and works seen in the exhibition.

Gallery talks will last 45 minutes, take place in the exhibition space unless otherwise noted, and have limited capacity.

Elizabeth Greenberg is an artist and educator living on the coast of Maine. Her passion for photography has been her guide for living a life and career immersed in a daily conversation about looking at and making pictures. She earned a BFA in photography at Rhode Island School of Design and received her MFA in Visual Arts from Vermont College. Elizabeth’s work has been exhibited across the country and she has curated numerous exhibitions. Currently, she is the Arnold and Augusta Newman Provost at Maine Media Workshops + College and administers the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture. Elizabeth teaches workshops in Maine and Hawaii and is a member of the faculty in both the certificate and MFA programs at the college.

Sean Kernan began his working life in theater, but morphed into a widely-exhibited photographer, writer, film maker, and teacher. His photographic work has been exhibited and published in France, Mexico, Egypt, Greece, China, Italy, Switzerland, Iran, Korea, and across the U.S. He has made the award-winning films Crow Stories, The Kampala Boxing Club, A Mind of Winter, and The Visitor. He also collaborated with choreographer Alison Chase on a theater/dance/multimedia work, Drowned that premiered at MASS MoCA. His clients include AT&T, Knoll, GE, Pratt and Whitney, New York Times, Smithsonian, Bloomberg, Harvard. He has taught and lectured at the New School/Parsons, Art Center Pasadena, Yale Medical School, ICP, and the University of Texas, and he has written for Communication Arts, Lenswork, and Graphis. He has offered classes at Maine Media and Santa Fe Workshops.

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"Drawn to the Light" Artist Talk featuring Brenton Hamilton

Friday, August 4, 2023
6:00 PM to 7:00 PM
Portland Museum of Art
7 Congress Square
Portland, ME 04101

Join photographer Brenton Hamilton as part of an in-gallery talk series that invites artists featured in Drawn to the Light: 50 Years of Photography at Maine Media Workshops + College to share insights about their artistic practices and works seen in the exhibition.

Gallery talks will last 45 minutes, take place in the exhibition space unless otherwise noted, and have limited capacity.

Brenton Hamilton, MFA has worked on the edges of photography and printmaking for three decades. He devotes his research to the 19th-century processes. Hamilton is a historian and lectures widely on photography in culture. He is a frequent independent curator, draws, paints with various mediums and collects objects from all cultures. Brenton!s work has been collected internationally and also placed in many national cultural institutions: Portland Museum of Art, Portland Maine, University of New England, The Farnsworth Museum and Lamar Dodd Art Center’s permanent collection in Georgia and recently the Bates Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine. His work is handled by TILT Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona and The Page Gallery in Camden, Maine. Recently, a 25 Year Retrospective monograph: Brenton Hamilton, A Blue Idyll was published by Schilt Publishing in Amsterdam.

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The Color of Light: 50 Years of Maine Media Photography Panel Discussion

Friday, August 11, 2023
6:00 PM to 7:00 PM
Portland Museum of Art
7 Congress Square
Portland, ME 04101

Join Maine Media Workshops + College photographers and educators as they speak about the resistance to and eventual acceptance of color photography in the fine arts in connection to the Drawn to the Light: 50 Years of Photography at Maine Media Workshops + College exhibition.

Elizabeth Greenberg is an artist and educator living on the coast of Maine. Her passion for photography has been her guide for living a life and career immersed in a daily conversation about looking at and making pictures. She earned a BFA in photography at Rhode Island School of Design and received her MFA in Visual Arts from Vermont College. Elizabeth’s work has been exhibited across the country and she has curated numerous exhibitions. Currently, she is the Arnold and Augusta Newman Provost at Maine Media Workshops + College and administers the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture. Elizabeth teaches workshops in Maine and Hawaii and is a member of the faculty in both the certificate and MFA programs at the college.

David Hilliard creates large-scale multi-paneled color photographs, often based on his life or the lives of people around him. He exhibits nationally and internationally and has won numerous awards including the Fulbright and Guggenheim. His photographs can be found in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, among others. Most recently his work was on view at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.. He is regular visiting faculty at Harvard University, Massachusetts College of Art & Design and Lesley University. Hilliard’s work appears in many publications and is represented by the Yancey Richardson Gallery in NYC, Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta and in Provincetown by the Schoolhouse Gallery.

Connie Imboden has spent more than 40 years using photography to examine, distort, and redefine the human body.?? Using the reflective and sometimes altering qualities of water and mirrors, her images create new forms that are at once mythological, archetypal, and expressive.? They are beautiful yet simultaneously disturbing, elegant though often haunting.? By so deeply investigating a subject we are so familiar with- the figure -her work reveals deeper meaning and insight to the human psyche.

 Imboden’s work is in the collections of many major museums including the the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Philadelphia Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationales in Paris, France and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne Germany.

Her first book of images, Out of Darkness, won the Silver Medal in Switzerland’s “Schonste Bucher Aus Aller Welt (Most Beautiful Book in the World)” award in 1993.  Her most recent book, “Reflections” was released in 2009.

In 2013 Sarah Leen became the first female Director of Photography at National Geographic Magazine and Partners. In 2020 she co-founded the Visual Thinking Collective, a community for independent women photo editors, teachers and curators dedicated to visual storytelling. 

Leen works with individual photographers, media and publishers consulting and editing long-term visual projects and photobooks including the 2020 FotoEvidence and World Press Photo Book Award winner HABIBI by Antonio Faccilongo, Anders Wo by Petra Barth, Like a Bird by Johanna-Fritz Maria, The Phoenician Collapse by Diego Ibarra Sanchez which won the 2022 Lucie Book Award for Independent Book, We Cry in Silence by Smita Sharma and A Troubled Home by Anush Babajanyan. She is also the photo editor of Ukraine: A War Crime by FotoEvidence which is shortlisted for the 2023 Arles Historical Book Award.

Craig Stevens is a photographer, printmaker and educator. He has taught, written and lectured extensively on the subjects of art and education and is Professor Emeritus of Photography at Savannah College of Art and Design, and has been teaching at Maine Media Workshops since 1974!

Craig is also on the faculty of the Santa Fe Workshops and the Anderson Ranch Art Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado.

In 2013 Craig was awarded the first annual Susan Carr Educator Award from ASMP (American Society of Media Professionals) at the PDN Awards in New York.

Richard Tuschman began experimenting with digital imaging in the early 1990s, developing a style that synthesized his interests in photography, painting, and assemblage. His staged cinematic images explore the complexities and emotional nuances of human relationships.He  has been exhibited widely, both in the US and internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland, AIPAD in NYC, and the Photovisa Festival in Krasnodar, Russia. He was named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Photography in 2016. He lives and works in New York City.
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For more details https://www.portlandmuseum.org/drawn-to-the-light.