Guy Saldanha stands in the second-floor room of Harbor Works Gallery in Cundy’s Harbor, talking about how the gallery started.
The gallery is in Civil War-era Holbrook-Trufant house, which is part of the Holbrook Wharf complex. From the second-floor windows, you can look out at the shingled snack bar and the red sides of the commercial fishing bays on the new wharf. Holbrook Wharf, an anchor of community life for over 150 years, has been saved from private sale and rebuilt by the community, with the re-opening ceremony held in July.
When Saldanha came down to look at this house over the winter, he was just looking for a darkroom and studio space. Saldanha has lived in Harpswell for the past 30 years. For the past 20 years, Saldanha, traveled across America, taking photos of workers in steel mills in the Midwest, coal miners in Appalachia, loggers in the Northwest, roughnecks on oil platforms and textile workers in Maine.
When he saw the harbor and what was being done to save the working wharf, he had a vision of doing something more. “It reminded me of many places around the country who were trying to maintain their own identity,” he said, about Cundy’s Harbor.
From thoughts of studio space, Saldanha has created something much bigger. Harbor Works Gallery will exhibit the work of photographers who tell stories about working communities across the country. Unlike much of art shown in Maine, people will be the focus. “Every story we show here will have a very large degree of portraiture, in which people are central,” he said.
Saldanha sees his gallery as a place that connects to the community. He wants to attract “the widest audience-not just buyers. It is important to me to establish a place where someone who works here [in the community] could come in and feel at home.”
What he shows should “have relevance to the aspirations and challenges and concerns of the people in this community,” Saldanha said.
The gallery will be open from mid-May through Columbus Day weekend and will feature three shows each season.
Harbor Work’s Gallery’s first show was “South Street: The Lost World of Lower Manhatten’s Fulton Fish Market,” photographs by Barbara Mench, about the 183-year old market that closed in 2005.
His second show, which opens September 1, is “Up River: The Story of a Maine Fishing Community,” photographs by Olive Pierce. These photos were originally published in a 1996 book with the same title.
Pierce’s photos are about the Carters and their cousins, the Harveys, fishing families who live in Waldoboro. Pierce owns a 100-acre island in Muscongus Bay. One day, when she was crossing the bay to the island, she asked a lobstermen if she could buy lobsters, according to her book. It was Fern Carter, the patriarch of the family. Later, he took Pierce hauling around her island, and she offered it to his family for camping.
Fern then asked her to photograph his son Daniel’s wedding, which occurred on June 10, 1987. “One thing led to another-and pretty soon 10 years had gone by,” Pierce said, in an interview.
“I liked the ruggedness of the land, and the richness of the life, the intermingling of people of all ages,” Pierce wrote in her book.
The photos are stark and honest, showing family members lobstering and clamming, but also extremely intimate moments like the carrying of a coffin at a funeral. The photos are a clear, sensitive depiction of hardworking people, with no attempt to romanticize their lives in any way.
The Carters and the Harveys were originally clam diggers, but left Swan’s Island after the clam flats were closed. After living on Vinalhaven, they moved to Waldoboro in the early 1950s. After the final move, the families established themselves as lobstermen, despite resistance from those already fishing. The men also dug for clams, and fished for shrimp, scallops and pogeys, according to Pierce’s book.
The Carters and Harveys live working class lives. As she started taking photos, Pierce worried she would offend them. “I feared my view of their lives might seem too harsh,” she wrote in her book.
“I was feeling protective of them by softening my prints,” Pierce said, in an interview.
“Then I realized that the life is harsh. So I printed more contrasty, harder prints, which came out to be much truer to their lives.”
“I wanted to give a realistic, respectful portrait of their lives,” Pierce said.
Pierce became friends with family members and placed her own limits on what she would photograph. She would not take photos of anyone who might get drunk, for example. “I felt as I got to know them, and that they were allowing me into their lives, that I had better use it responsibly,” she said.
Pierce did not need to worry about their response. Family members came to her first show of these photos at the Farnsworth Art Museum in 1989 and many drove to Cambridge, Mass. for a show there in 1992.
“I should have had more confidence in my friends’ stout opinion of themselves,” she wrote.