Outland

Oultand is a photographic account of my complicated relationship with the outland state of Maine, or more precisely, with its enigmatic residents. Drawn to Maine by the spaciousness and fierce beauty of its coast, I have been going there every summer since 1979, the year after I immigrated to the US from the Soviet Union. Eventually we bought a house in Machiasport, a town on the remote Maine coast, which is to be found in the easternmost point of the United States. It has now been four decades of me doing all things Maine. Yet even now, in the 46 th year of being there, I remain a stranger in a strange land; a vacationer in a frontier country populated by outlanders more foreign to me than people of countries I’ve been to only once. Hence Outland is the account of the opposite: it is a photo-essay documenting my failure to connect with Mainers and cementing my role of a distant observer. A great street photographer, Bruce Gilden, freely admits in his videos that he is an angry man, and it is his anger that and connects him with his subjects, resulting in remarkable angry images. In contrast to Bruce Gilden, I am not an angry person but a caring one. As a psychiatrist, even when I photograph, I remain a radar for all people’s emotions and whatever I register through empathy, I capture with my camera. It is this reciprocity that breathes life into my images. When photographing Mainers, what I felt most often was their free-floating anger, which is a hard emotion to connect with. Because this anger never resonated, the bleak discontent present in many of the photographs in this book are not mine, but of Mainers. Both anger and discontent were difficult to empathize with, prompting me to mostly stay a safe distance away. There must be a reason why the Maine motto “The way life should be” reads more like “Our clan’s way of life” than “Welcome”. The Maine style as I have seen it at county fairs and as featured in this book can more accurately be described as an emphatic absence of any style at all. My first explanation for this phenomenon was that as life on the remote frontier is so difficult that one is entitled to wearing whatever. On second look, however, the mish-mush of Down East clothes is so bizarre and in your face that it could only be deliberate. I suspect their clothes express Mainers’ conscious or subconscious disdain for outsiders. The unsaid, rather unfriendly message broadcasted by these outfits is “This is still a frontier, an Outland, and I dress like an outlander. I don’t care what you think, and don’t you dare say anything.” The attitude pertains both to casual clothes and to the holiday best worn at county fairs and gatherings documented in my images. The outfits worn at the fairs may match but could still be prominently unusual. I suspect that is Mainers’ continuous state of anger and discontent is brought on not only by their frontier mentality but also their never-ending, fierce battle with the elements. Arguably, Maine has the harshest coastal weather in the US. Strong salty winds gusting from the ocean result in corroded metal, crumbled wood, and shingles blown off walls and roofs. Thus, the frontier mentality endures, casting a shadow over Maine citizens and evidenced by their appearance, clothes, and lifestyle. These attributes, both resonating and disturbing, are on full flesh and blood display in the Down East, creating the atmosphere of estrangement which permeates the photographs of this book.