HARBOR WORKSExhibits
Harbor Works features two photography exhibits each summer by visiting documentary artists who are storytellers of historical and contemporary resource-based communities. One display is an essay about a place in Maine; the other, an extensive narrative drawn from a coherent and substantial body of images and text by someone who has lived and perhaps worked in a community anywhere in North America. Through an intimate familiarity with the environment, the rhythm of labor and the daily expression of human relationships, they reveal a neighborhood, village or region that is rooted in the land or sea. Thoughtful observers of the human condition, their humility and patience have allowed them to bear witness to the joys and agonies of life in a very singular place. Oral histories, primary documents and authentic artifacts enhance their presentation, which unfolds like a short film or novel. A diversity of settings from remote mountain farms to crowded urban wharves suggest themes of substantial relevance to Cundy’s Harbor, the working waterfront and rural Maine.
Honoring a tradition of master photographers who were visual historians of people and their environments, from Solomon Butcher’s sod house frontier to Doris Ulmann’s Smokey Mountain farms, Harbor Works seeks visiting exhibits that explore how communities shaped by the land or sea cope with the forces that surround them. Some stories, reminiscent of Don Normack’s Chavez Ravine, reveal a vibrant and productive culture rooted in the family, while others, evocative of Builder Levy’s Appalachian coal fields, chronicle a regional struggle for civil and labor rights. Still others, like William Anderson’s Southern sharecroppers, express a quiet dignity nurtured by faith and spirituality, or, like Kendall Nelson’s cowboys of the Great Basin, a resourceful individuality forged in physical isolation.
Recognizing common aspirations and challenges in the experiences of other resource-based communities, Harbor Works presents exhibits whose portraits call attention to the social and environmental conditions of our time. Perhaps it is an aging Virginia miner with black lung in his ancestral cemetery, beset by energy companies that are blasting the surrounding mountain tops for every last ton of Appalachian coal. Perhaps it is an Ozark Mountain farmer with his team of mules, who struggles to preserve the integrity of the soils and forests on the rocky margin of giant chicken farms. Or maybe it is the clannish fish mongers of South Street, fiercely determined to maintain their traditional market in defiance of commercial real estate plans to remake New York’s waterfront. Like memorable passages in the chapters of an ongoing story, each image enlarges our understanding of the interrelationship of events far beyond our own geography.
Impelled by the disappearance of landscapes and seascapes where generations of families labored close to the elements, Harbor Works’ exhibits are timely and perceptive records of a way of life that is invisible to the prevailing culture. Each story suggests an artist whose relentless desire to understand their world drives them, gathering remnants, to its forgotten corners. Perhaps it is the workings of a gold mine 900 ft. below Arizona’s Black Mountains where hard rock miners, drilling a round of blast holes in the dark and dampness of a narrow stope, remind us of the human tolerance for precarious conditions of work. Perhaps it is the old first ward of Buffalo’s waterfront where sixth-generation Irish longshoremen, scooping grain from the bowels of lake freighters, focus our attention on a craft, learned and passed along. Or maybe it is the simple interior of a cabin where an elderly South Carolina sharecropper, facing his garden, engages our respect for wisdom and fortitude in the face of persistent social inequality.