photographer Winky Lewis interviewed by Sharon Kitchens

I first connected with Winky Lewis via our mutual friends Steve and Kate Shaffer who own Black Dinah Chocolatiers on Isle au Haut. Everything that comes from Kate, Steve, and that island is good so before I met Winky I already liked her a lot. When Boston Globe Magazine did a story on my little homestead and hired her to take the pictures any nervousness I might have felt blew gently out the window. While being an exceptionally talented photographer she is also one of the kindest human beings I have known. In the past year I have realized an efflorescence in her images as she pushes boundaries documenting her children who are growing into young adults. It seemed a good time to learn more about the quiet person behind the camera and to share her and her work with The Maine’s readers.

Q&A

What is your earliest memory of photography? How did it come to you or how did you find it? 

Gosh, that is hard. I do have vivid memories of taking lots of pictures with my little Kodak camera that was so fun! Opening those envelopes of photos was as good as Christmas. Also, my father took great photos of our family when we were young, they are really beautiful. I’ve got many of them stashed away in a box right by my desk. Those pictures have always been very important to me. Family photos can be very powerful. I’ve come across some that have literally made my heart skip a beat with some new realization or thought. My brother edited some super-8 video from our childhood recently and I swear that file, with the two minutes of imagery, is one of my very very favorite possessions. I cannot watch it without a flood of tears.

What strikes me about your work is that you’re able to capture such intimate situations with your family, but how light and comfortable they feel. As if with so many of your photos you have invited the viewer in to sit down for family dinner. How much do you think about the audience when you share these images? 

I don’t think about the audience at all. I just take the pictures because I love doing so, it sounds weird to say I have to make them, but I do feel I have to make pictures. If I think about an audience at all it is after I’ve shot the images and get to work on them on my computer. I’m working of a project now with a dear writer friend and she recently asked if I’m trying to tell a story, and in most cases, I’m really not, I’m just capturing and recording when I’m shooting.

Why did you choose your children as a subject? 

Ha! I’ll get to the obvious answer in a second, but I will say that my favorite subject matter has always been children. Even when I was a kid. My mother got very sick when I was eight years old and at about that point I started taking lots of pictures, many were of my little brother, who was only two at the time. I think I was trying to divert my attention from the scary situation with my mother towards what was healthy, beautiful, and innocent. And I was preserving that in cold, hard photographs. Even better! I continued to photograph children always, even in college, when photography became more of a serious endeavor for me. And these last thirteen years, I’ve been lucky enough to have three of my own kids to photograph. I’m with then all the time, they soak up most hours of my day, so as long as they’ve been around there was never a question as to who or what I would photograph. I am very fortunate.

How do your children feel about having their picture taken and what do they think about the pictures?

The answer to that changes all the time, I think, for each of them. They grew up with me taking lots of pictures, so they were just comfortable with the camera. Recently I’ve been more focused on my daughter, I think I’ve gravitated to her more last year as she was eight years old and that was a big year for me as a kid. Turns out it was a big year for her too, and I think we’ve made an interesting record of that. And there was a lot of teamwork involved with that body of work. My boys have moved on from being interested in being in the pictures, but I’m hoping they’ll have renewed interest, their interest does seems to ebb and flow. And as far as what they think of the pictures, often there isn’t that much interest. I have to say though, I feel it is a huge compliment when they like them.

Sally Mann said of photographing her family there is a vulnerability to it. Would you agree, how does this vulnerability come out?

Certainly. I think there is a vulnerability in just putting any images out into the world. The fact that I’m sharing photographs of my children is something I often think long and hard about. I forever need to put myself in their shoes and think about how I’m putting their images out into the world, and how they’ll feel down the road. Usually I don’t think of my photos as photographs of my children, but more as ideas, or feelings, or memories, but I can never forget that these are my children, and I have to be careful and respectful. They are giving me a tremendous gift by allowing me to photograph them and I hope they will always see it as a healthy collaboration.

painting by Jessica Stammen

You don’t need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, simply wait. Don’t even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

-Kafka

***

Every Tuesday The Maine will post a new painting by Jessica Stammen. These small works, all 4 x 4 inches on cradled birchwood panels, will be concurrently listed for auction on dailypaintworks.com, a fantastic platform designed by artists, for artists. View the auction for this painting here, or simply click on the image above.

Tuesday 207 paintings are exclusive to The Maine. They depict the land, the light and the people that make this state a state of wonder. Visit the growing gallery of Tuesday 207 paintings here.

Jessica is the editor of The Maine and writes occasionally as The Outsider.

an adventure a day for the month of December by Shannon Thompson

For 12/4, 124 reps each:
Squats
Push-ups
Walking lunges
Sit-ups
Tricep dips

Plus a 124-second plank with four instances of cheating.

photographs and text by Jennifer Steen Booher

What happens in a tourist town when tourist season is over? In Bar Harbor, we have a Pajama Sale to celebrate. Stores open at 6am, with coffee, doughnuts, and discounts for anyone who comes in their pajamas. This year was the 19th annual Pajama Sale, and it has become enough of an institution that lots of us have bought special pjs just to wear for the sale. Some people go all out with curlers in their hair, sleep masks, and green face goop. At 10am, when I am usually shopped-out and starting to feel a little silly wearing my robe and slippers in broad daylight, there are Bed Races. A short segment of Cottage Street is barricaded off for the racecourse:

The racers line up at the Village Green and parade down Main Street so everyone can admire the beds and the costumes. The lobster exoskeleton below is pieced together from plastic Solo cups:

The Town Band joined in this year for the first time. Official racers have to follow the rules – strict bed dimensions, four people to push and one to ride on the bed – but the band was only there to make noise and have fun, so they loaded ‘er right up and marched along making music.

They had the slowest time ever registered at the race, too, a fact which makes them very proud.

Other teams took it quite seriously, planning out the lightest weight beds and the toughest wheels. This was the R.M.Foster team (defending champions from last year: they won again this year):

These guys called themselves the “Beach Bums” – I think they were the Jackson Lab’s team. It was about 40 degrees out that day, so they only stripped down for the actual race. Brrr! That’s serious dedication to a costume theme:

Governor’s is a sort-of-local restaurant (their closest branch is in Ellsworth):

And this was the team from the Bar Harbor Inn, serving up a stuffed lobster (in a bed):

Here’s the plastic-cup-lobster-woman again:

And the wildly enthusiastic team from Camp Beech Cliff:

It may have been dreamed up by the Chamber of Commerce to perk up post-tourist/pre-holiday spending, but frankly it’s a genius of a “holiday” that comes just as winter darkness is taking over, lets creativity fly, and has no cultural expectations, family baggage, or general holiday stresses. I mean really, how tense can you get rolling around town in your jammies?

text by Jess Smith

Hello, my name is Jess Smith and I am a craft show widow.

For the past few weeks my husband has been living in his studio (which, luckily, is at our house) in preparation for the Artfull Gifts holiday craft show. It’s an annual, weekend-long show featuring 50 high-end Maine artisans and this was his first year doing it. I had to work the first day of the show but I thought I ought to tag along Sunday to lend a helping hand.

What I’m learning about helping my husband at craft shows is this: more often than not, less is more.

So there I was in Northport for six hours with little to do except force Austin to take the occasional leg-stretching break. I brought a veritable Mary Poppins bag of things to entertain me – knitting, two new library books, my sketchbook and coloring pencils, but mostly what I ended up doing all day was shopping and chatting with the other vendors. I wanted to share some of my favorite picks from the show.

1. Guapa Leather
Guapa is a wife and husband duo based in Belfast. Our neighbors to the right, these two create a line of hand-sewn leather bags, wallets and other accessories. Their strap wallets really spoke to me and at $42 for locally hand-made leather I could have easily gotten one in each color, but trying to be good and not undo too much of the success Austin was having next-door I opted for a chic, simple leather snap bracelet at $13.

2. Dulse & Rugosa
For holiday secrecy reasons I can’t tell you what I bought from Dulse & Rugosa, a mother-daughter team from Gotts Island. Suffice it to say, it was really hard to choose. Everything at their booth smelled so wonderful. They make their line of bath and body products using hand-picked botanicals from their small island garden, and supplementing what they can’t grow with ingredients harvested from their natural surroundings – the woods, shore and meadows.

I was really excited to learn about their “Taste, Make & Take” evenings at Breakwater Vineyards in Rockland. It’s the last Sunday of every month and for $15 you get to try four local wines, and create and take home your very own spa products.

Side note: Carly from Dulse & Rugosa wins the Artfull Gifts “Friendliest” superlative.

3. Luksin
I first came across Luksin at the Common Ground Fair this past September, where Daria’s modern designs, sumptuous dyes, and earth-and-ethics-conscious fabric choices stood out from the crowd. This weekend I fell in love with a beautiful chambray denim tunic shirt and a gorgeous dark navy organic cotton scarf. Have dropped hints to Aust for birthday and Christmas…

4. Bixby Bars
I have to admit I’ve seen these bars around and have been hesitant to try them because of the whole “healthy chocolate” thing. It can’t be that good, right? Wrong. One of the great things about a show like Artfull Gifts is FREE SAMPLES. I tried the To The Nines white chocolate, Goji berry, pistachio and cardamom bar and it was amazing. All of their bars are certified gluten-free, and they have a number of vegan offerings as well. But don’t let that fool you. These bars don’t taste like squirrel food, they taste like a gourmet dessert.

Creator Kate McAleer’s website is really worth a peruse. I especially liked her blog post linking to this video about a shared-use kitchen which allows local food producers like Bixby to create their product in a USDA approved environment, when they might not be able to afford to do so on their own.

5. Sisters Soap
Sisters Soap owner Megan Owen Caferatta creates a fantastically fragrant line of soaps using her sister Caitlin Hunter’s (Appleton Creamery) goats milk. Scents range from Rainbow Sherbet (which was spot on, and brought me back to my childhood) to Bergamot & Seaweed, and everything in between.

6. Jeweled Horizons
Northport-based Maureen O’Keefe travels around the world collecting unique beads, which she brings back and sells here in Maine. I was immediately drawn to a no-frills strand of brass beads on string which Maureen tells me are from Ethiopia. Maureen also is the mastermind behind these pearl necklace cat collars. I was tempted to buy one for June, but Bear would have been jealous.

7. Alec Hartman Photography
Our across-the-way neighbor was a young photographer from Vassalboro. I loved his whimsical animal portraits and was particularly taken with a photo of a bear cub who seemed to be causally strolling down a rural road on his hind legs. “Look at that bear walking down the road!” I said to Aust. “You mean look at that bear running down the road, at the photographer?” he replied. Good point, I thought. In fact, a lot of Alec’s shots have this “how did he do that” quality – especially his series of chipmunks in staged settings, like eating at a miniature picnic table.

8. Abby’s Cabs
Lisa Lord from Old Town, Maine named her polished stone jewelry business after her dog Abby. At her booth I discovered my love for a beautiful light blue stone called beryl, which is native to Maine. I’ve been wanting a right hand ring since my left hand got all the glory last September. Due to my ridiculous ring-size (3.5) Lisa and her assistant told me I could special order a beryl ring from them. I can pick out the shape of the stone, the setting, and it’s at no extra cost (most of her rings are a very reasonable $30!). This is a definite for my birthday wishlist this December. I’m really excited about this one.

Austin had a pretty successful show this weekend. He also was featured in Down East Magazine’s 133 Maine-Made Gifts article in their December issue. I’m so proud of him, and glad he can rest for a bit now until it’s time to get ready for the next show!

text and haiku by Kristen Lindquist

Light snow falling this morning, enough that my brakes didn’t quite catch at that first stop sign on my way to work. Fortunately, the powdered streets were quiet, a held breath.

One lesson of snow:
control is an illusion.
Breathe in that cold air.

photographs by Brian Willson

adventure by Shannon Thompson

I was sitting in a bleak conference room at the Holiday Inn near the airport in Bangor last week, buckled in to a 9-hour session of continuing education for real estate brokers, when I hatched my plan to survive embrace December.

It doesn’t come naturally: I fight with the cold, bristle at the clutter of snow boots, mittens, brushes, and shovels, and push against the darkness like Princess Leia in the trash compactor. Give me the sunny hugeness and ease of a July day any day. Every day. Someday I’ll live somewhere that promises 365 days of summer. (Q: Won’t you miss the seasons? A: No.)

Meanwhile, here I am in the place I love except for seven months of its weather. Here, with a good life and a deep determination to be happy and have fun. I know that the only thing separating misery or delight is my approach to it.

Last October, after 25 years of planning on downhill skiing but never actually going, I had the guys at Sidecountry Sports outfit me with new gear, which radically changed my perspective on snow. Before the skis, I was seriously Scroogey about snowfall: pretty, I guess, yeah, but what a huge pain in the ass. Who needs it? Get me to a beach, man. After the skis: checking forecasts and jumping for joy as the flakes fall. It made me consider all the other things that I’m persistently grouchy about and how they can be completely transformed by one small action or thought pattern. It’s just a matter of finding the happy thing that turns the grouchy thing inside out and practicing it.

As a kid I loved the rituals of Advent. Before I can even remember, my mom made us a felt and burlap advent calendar that had felt ornaments with snaps on the back and a big felt tree with the other side of the snaps sewn all over it. My brother and I took turns each day sliding an ornament from its numbered pocket and snapping it on to the tree. We’d light the candles on the advent wreath at dinner every evening, pushing the early darkness away. These were the first things I thought of when I slid out of bed each morning. These small actions made every day feel significant in a way that the days of other months didn’t.

I no longer celebrate advent in a religious way, but I love the idea of consciously recognizing the specialness of each day. In that spirit, I decided to celebrate advent with adventure this year, choosing something new each day. It’s an idea I believe I stole from my friend Jessica’s excellent blog, The Maine. I have a full-time job and a very limited budget, so while the options for adventuring are limited, the opportunities for creativity are huge.

My criteria are broad. For this month, an adventure is anything that 1) takes me out of my comfort zone; 2) I’m not 100% sure I can do; 3) I’ve never done; 4) I wouldn’t normally do in December; 5) is ridiculously fun; or 6) is something I’m so glad I’m doing that I don’t have to actually enjoy doing it.

A call for ideas among friends yielded some doozies and some great offers. Today an Alaskasmokejumper offered to teach me how to use a chainsaw. (YES.) I’m looking forward tosurfing, rock climbing, ice climbing, tennis, cave-finding and -exploring, lobstering, sea-urchin diving (not actually diving, just tagging along), hiking, birdwatching, downhill skiing, cross country skiing, skinning, swimming one hundred 100s, open mike night, karaoke, kayaking, photographing strangers, test driving a Tesla, mountain biking, lighting up the Mt. Battie star, taking an African dance class, reading to YMCA daycare kids, 100 burpees, skate skiing, and more. (Attending a public hearing and going for a long run/getting drunk after donating blood are the only two I’m not giving serious consideration. Maybe by the end of the month when I’m warmed up.) Some of these things scare the crap out of me. I’m still looking for more ideas, especially those that can be accomplished before and after office hours on a weekday, and I love adventuresome company.

So here comes the beast that is December. This year I will not cower and scowl: I’m coming out with my fun guns blazin’.

Editor’s note: Check out Shannon’s first day of ADVENTure at Sunday River here.