York Corner
A few years back, we wrote about Cyndi Bennett in this column because we knew her as a crackerjack waitress at Ruby's, and, when we came to interview her, we discovered that she was many other estimable things, too, including an avid photographer.
This week, she and three other amateur York photographers teamed up to stage their own little Sunday-afternoon by-invitation-only photography exhibition, and we were tickled to be on the invitation list.
The show was held at Cyndi's place on Avon Avenue and featured works by the four sponsors only - plus wine, beer, quiche, cookies, cheeses and multiple other enticing finger foods - and when we got to interview the four there, we were even more tickled to discover the variety of approach and independence of spirit that they, and their show, represented.
For starters, each works full-time at another job, and for only one is that job at all related to photography.
Cyndi is now a bartender as well as a waitress, and still at Ruby's. Neil Rideout is facility manager (read "custodian," he says) at York High School. Adam Hilbourne is a lobsterman, full-time and year-round. (He's done scalloping and gill-netting, too, and he supplements his income by snowplowing in winter and by bartending at the Lobster Barn's Lobster-in-the-Rough in summer.) Kristen Gurtman is the one with a somewhat-photography-related job: a 2001 graduate of the Maine College of Art, she told us that she majored in graphic design, took one year of courses there in black-and-white photography, and now works in the graphics department of a Portsmouth advertising agency.
When it comes to the photography, there are other major differences as well.
Kristen, clearly, has been photographing for some time now, and Cyndi reported that she's been at it for 10 years, but for Neil it's been only two, and, for Adam, a mere six months.
Additionally, while Adam is going at it the old-fashioned way, wrestling with matters like f-stops, shutter speeds and focal lengths in teaching himself to master a 30-year-old 35mm Yashica that had been his brother's, Neil, with a Nikon 3100, calls himself "strictly digital" but doesn't yet do any major computer alterations of his images.
Kristen, by contrast, feeds all her images through her computer, even ones that she takes with a 35mm camera (she has Eagle Photo, in Portsmouth, develop them onto a contact sheet which she can then scan into her computer), and, while she doesn't alter the composition of her image, she might alter aspects of it like its color or brightness.
Even more independently, Cyndi shoots with a six-year-old 35mm Pentax 2X30 but keeps the setting on automatic, always. She works in black-and-white almost all the time, but sometimes hand-colors her color shots and even some of the black-and-whites. Though she doesn't alter her photos digitally, Cyndi showed us a color nature shot that Dwight Bardwell of York, using equipment he has in a shop in Dover, had scanned for her and printed, enlarged, on canvas. Dominated by greens and yellows, it featured a birch tree, front and center, and the enlargement made the framed photo look like a painting.
Thus far, none of these photographers has used a computer to mix images from different sources in one frame. All the photos they were displaying on Sunday, though some might have been cropped or otherwise computer-doctored, showed essentially what the photographer was seeing through the view-finder at the time the picture was taken.
Among the images were lots of nature, some of man-made structures, and few of people or of conventional tourist sites like the Nubble.
Cyndi's stunning black-and-whites were of subjects that included shadows on a brick wall; a signpost in Manhattan; a dinghy beached on a sandy inlet; granite-block walls, seen close up at Fort McClary; her own prized 1962 Ford Falcon, shown in profile; and a friend, caught candidly in a thoughtful pause. Many were nature shots, and many of those were taken in the Bar Harbor area where she vacations, Cyndi said. One, now of historic value, was of the marquee at the now-vanished York Beach Cinema.
Neil told us that, when it came to subjects, he was "all over the place," though he volunteered, cheerily, "I don't take pictures of things that move yet." He'll stop for a shot on Route 103 on his way to work, he said, and some of the photos he was exhibiting had clearly been taken in Washington, D.C. - the brooding Lincoln statue, for example. Among his local shots: an imaginative composition showing boats at Kittery's town wharf in the foreground with a bridge against the sky forming the background.
Adam's focus seemed primarily on the natural world, and he told us that he'd taken many of the pictures he was exhibiting on fall hunting trips he makes to the Maine woods north of Greenville and around Kokadjo. The photos showed sensitive studies of woodland streams, footprints in deep snows, rocks and cloud formations, stone walls, brittle beech leaves. But among them were also a shot of Portsmouth's State Street Saloon sign, and one of the big Coast Guard buoy that washed up on Short Sands in April's storm.
Adam brought to the show a thick portfolio of photos, snapshot-sized, while Kristen brought only five of hers, enlarged and framed. In them, her subjects were patterns and structures - images on two rocks, for example, that looked like landscapes, and a photo taken over the side of the Golden Gate Bridge that showed orange girders extending diagonally across the lower frame of the picture while the upper frame revealed the shadow of the bridge's superstructure falling upon the sea. "I like to make people think about what they're looking at," Kristen told us in explaining these.
This show was casual in origin - Cyndi said the four just decided to create it for themselves for the fun of it, with no rules or restrictions - but they spent four months preparing for it. As part of the preparation, Kristen designed a postcard-sized invitation ("Are YOU in the Loupe?" it asked), which went out to some 60 guests. Helping out with the preparations, too, Cyndi reported, was Mike Filliettaz, who's a good friend of Adam's.
In the end, what we loved about it - in addition to the very high quality of much of the work presented - was the non-judgmental mutual support among participants that the show represented, the independence that each was showing in pursuing his or her own interests (and their boldness and daring), and the sheer joy that each was clearly taking from the pursuit.
Vive la loupe!
And keep your own lenses peeled for the works of these too-modest photographers, because they're definitely vision-expanding.
