SOUTHWEST HARBOR — An extensive collection of images, snapped in Southwest Harbor by resident photographer Willis Humphreys Ballard from 1934 to 1977, has opened a window on the area’s life and times.
Ballard’s 3,500 prints and negatives are a major part of the Southwest Harbor Public Library’s overall holdings of around 10,000 historic photographs dating back to 1850.
Thanks to the collection and research efforts over the past five years by two dedicated volunteers, Southwest Harbor could soon become one of the best-documented communities in the nation.
Ballard was a person of modest means who made a living through photography. As a photographer for hire, he provided images for businesses, schools, towns, newspapers and Acadia National Park. During World War II, he was the army and navy’s official civilian military photographer in the Southwest Harbor area. Boatyards commissioned him to document launches of yachts and fishing boats. He snapped graduation pictures and portraits of proud new store owners.
He also had a postcard business, and always had an eye out for scenic vistas while hiking around Acadia while carrying, early on, a cumbersome case that contained his Graphlex view camera, exposure meters, filters, film and a heavy wooden tripod.
Although Ballard wasn’t trying to record the life and times of the community, his work, taken together, is an important historical oeuvre that offers an understanding of another era. For viewers of an exhibit of his work presented earlier this summer, the images also evoked nostalgia and a sense of connection.
Ballard was a regular guy. He and his wife Ruth lived in a modest house down a side street; his darkroom was in the basement. Folks stopped by to buy his postcards.
“Everybody on the island had Ballards,” said co-curator Charlotte Morrill. “They had them on their walls; they were given them as wedding presents. People had postcards and kept them. It was amazing to me.”
The fragile artifacts are curated by Morrill and Meredith Hutchins, whose backgrounds as “from-away” technophile and “local” former librarian and historian have proved a happy marriage for leveraging the collection into a comprehensible narrative.
Morrill is a retired graphic artist and retail marketing consultant with considerable experience in creating searchable databases. In 2007, Hutchins was doing her best to organize and preserve photographs donated over the years to the library. A trustee at the time, Morrill volunteered to create a searchable database that would make it easier for the public to access photos.
Thanks to digital technology, old prints and negatives could be scanned; copies of the scans could be enlarged, cleaned and sharpened, making it easy to study details. With help from local genealogists and various preservation resources, Morrill and Hutchins took it upon themselves to investigate as much detail as possible in each image, putting names and narratives to faces, structures and scenes through the decades. Each strand of research, followed to the last degree, accompanies the relevant images.
“It’s more than a photographic project,” said Morrill. “It’s a history project using photographs.”
In the Ballards, they had a major trove. Morrill and Hutchins found a team of Acadia National Park volunteers, thanks to local author Don Lenahan, to scan the negatives and transcribe notes Ballard made on his negative sleeves, a process that took two winters.
“Every day we downloaded what the scanner had done that day, and I began looking at this stuff, and I said, ‘Oh, my goodness!'” Morrill said.
A PERSONAL LEGACY
Around the same time, Ballard’s grandson, Rob Michael of Portland, contacted the library and a local historical society, hoping to find a home for his grandfather’s equipment—the old desk where Ballard made his contact prints, the handmade timer.
“It was almost a crie de coeur, ‘What’s going to happen to the legacy?'” Morrill said. “So we just said yes to everything.”
The duo’s interest was further piqued when they read a 1998 memoir of Ballard’s life written by his daughter, Diane Michael, now deceased. The document describes the evolution of Ballard’s career and tradecraft.
Born in Portland in 1906, Ballard moved to Southwest Harbor with his wife, Ruth, in the early 1930s and set up a business making salon photographs and postcards, then expanding to outside commissions. Installing a homemade lightbox, wood sinks and other gear in the basement studio of their home, his career thrived for 40-plus years.
The postcards were “extremely labor-intensive,” Michael wrote. The images were heat-flattened, then cooled between the pages of a Sears Roebuck catalog. Each postcard was measured and cut by hand, stamped with his logo, hand-curled to curve in the same direction, then counted, sorted and banded for sale. Ballard once estimated he had printed over a million postcards, one-by-one.
Morrill and Hutchins continue to put in an intense amount of research into each image. They complement each other. Hutchins, deeply rooted in the community, understands local culture. Morrill asks “the dumb questions,” as she said. Another major player is Ralph Stanley, a retired wooden boatbuilder and local historian.
“He sits in our living room, and we blow up the Ballard photographs,” said Morrill. “If there are 25 boats in the harbor, he’ll tell us about 15. And that means who built them, where they fished, the funny stories about it, how big they were, when it was changed, where it died. And we take it all down.”
For generations to come, said Morrill, the Ballard project will illuminate a slice of American experience that is almost gone.
“This was a little microcosm of a fishing community and of people who came here and stayed and made the best of what they had,” she said. “They were here and they were interwoven and they worked hard. I guess it’s just human life all right here in this little circle.”