Maine

by Eliot Porter

A master of color photography offers a collection of photographs of coastal Maine that reflect man's created environment as well as the eternal beauty of land and sea

Genres: Photography

160 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1986

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a Maine photographer I immediately fell in love with this book. Porter's efforts to focus in on nature's details is evident throughout.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

The lobster fisherman is without a doubt the most independent, self-reliant, inflexible Yankee of all New England. He never has a good word for the weather, for lobstering, for the market, or for the future. Although his dour pessimism finds expression in invective against the larger enterprises that market his catch, or what he takes as interference by the government, or against the impersonal forces of nature driving him down, he rarely is discouraged to the point of throwing in the sponge. I have, however, never met a Maine seiner or lobsterman who admitted satisfaction with his operations; something was always going wrong. If lobsters or herring are scarce, the high prices they bring never make up for the cost of catching them, and when on rare occasions they happen to be plentiful, prices are too low for profitable fishing. Why do they keep on, then? one may ask. I think the answer is to be found in the life they lead - they are independent and free from the pressures of society. They are their own bosses, accountable to no other person. Self-reliance has its price in risk and uncertainty and danger, but it is a commodity not willingly disposed of, on which no value can be placed; no security counterbalances the independence of the man in the boat far from shore, rocking on the swell, hauling and resetting his traps in foam and surge around a ledge. The value is written on the man's unshaven weatherbeaten face, his callused hand, and in the knowledge and experience of the sea, of fog and storms, of reefs and rocky islands with their sea birds, all recorded in his mind.