"It requires constant vigilance to see people as they are."
-Olive Pierce
When I show up at Olive's home, she is making her way up her icy walk, wearing a down jacket and using a ski pole as a cane. At 86, her body is slight, her movements delicate, but when I catch up with her just before she ducks into the house, she turns around and grins, slinging me a hearty, "HEY!"
We enter the kitchen, simple and spacious. There's a New Yorker on the counter, soup bubbling on the stove, and an airy breakfast nook set out for lunch with china in various shades of blue. And I'd thought I was going to have to skip lunch. I nestle my recorder between the serving platters, and we sit across from each other, eating our meal--"soup from a can doctored with tahini and rice vinegar," salad, cheese, crackers, focaccia, and, for dessert, orange slices and "German Christmas cake." She seems to watch my face for a reaction to this out of season dish, delighting to think I might really believe she is serving me two-month old cake.
Olive Pierce is a documentary photographer best known for her photographs of two families in a tiny Maine fishing community, which were gathered over the course of ten years living in the community and have been collected in the book Up River: The Story of a Maine Fishing Community. She chose grainy high contrast film for this series, and the resultant photographs are incredibly gritty and human, providing a rare and intimate glimpse into a community known for its insularity.
Let me emphasize the time-line: for ten years, Olive went out fishing with the Harveys and the Carters, attended their weddings and their funerals, and joined in their Christmas celebrations. She even slept over at their houses from time to time. This type of extended immersion is not unheard of in journalism--one thinks of Gay Talese and Leon Dash, of Ted Conover spending a year as a prison guard to report on corruption amongst prison employees. And yet this immersion is incredibly impressive: I heartily cheer on anyone who can dive completely into a project and then emerge from its gaping maw, years later, eyes shiny with adventure and a finished work in hand.
Even given the serious commitment of time, how did Olive navigate through the complexities of her subject to create something so candid? In her images, Olive manages to create a portrait that is neither saccharine nor patronizing, that sidesteps the romanticism typical to images of coastal Maine as well as the contempt and distrust that some show toward this poverty-stricken community. I figure it must have taken a pretty unique person to become welcomed into a community that has reason to distrust outsiders, and then to take intimate photographs of that community that are neither critical nor idealized, but simply straightforward.
Olive Pierce was born in 1925. She grew up in Lake Forest, an affluent suburb of Chicago, and went on to study English at Vassar. Afterward she traveled to Poland as secretary for a United Nations medical team. She saw firsthand the "rubbled ruins of Warsaw" and "stared dumbfounded at the piles of children's shoes at the death camp at Auschwitz. "[1] And she started taking photographs to document what she saw.
Olive got married and started a family, settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When her children were young, she picked up a camera again to take portraits of them. The process was nothing like it is today; few people had cameras and darkroom access was rare. Under the tutelage of Berenice Abbott, a photographer famous for her photographs of New York architecture, Olive learned how to develop film. Her first darkroom printing was done with a technique she calls, "Dark of the Moon printing;" with no studio at home, she would do part of her printing off site and then bring the prints home to finish. The transport could only be done on the few days out of the month when there was no moon out. Eventually she learned to develop negatives at home, and her bathroom became regularly festooned with negatives, freshly developed and dripping dry.
Olive's early photos were, as I mentioned, mainly portraits of children. Using smooth film, she took spare, quiet portraits of her children, lingering in the doorway of the family's summer home in Vinalhaven, Maine, walking on the beach, standing together in a field. The portraits don't tell as much of a story as her later work, but they certainly have their own elegance and beauty. Neighbors and friends soon began commissioning Olive to take portraits of their children, and Olive's photography business was born.
In addition to studying with Bernice Abbott, Olive studied with Paul Caponigro, and also spent a year studying photography at Harvard. Olive credits her time at Harvard for nudging her toward the type of documentary photographs that typify her later work. For example, one of her first assignments was to pick a specific block in Boston and just hang out there, taking pictures--clearly a task bent toward the making of candid, everyday images rather than posed portraiture. The Harvard course also compelled Olive to branch out from taking pictures of children; asked what prompted this shift, Olive replies, somewhat tongue-in-cheek: "the professor forbade photos of children, and I didn't want to flunk."
In person, Olive has intelligent eyes and a dry wit. She takes time to think about what you say, and gives straight responses, occasionally tempered with a mischievous twinkle. After studying at Harvard, she was a high school photography teacher. Her first book, No Easy Roses, is a series of portraits of students from the inner city high school where she taught. One of her former students captures Olive's uniquely thoughtful approach, recalling his first day in her class: he asked where he should sit, and she paused, thought about the question, and replied, "sit wherever you think you might learn the most."
When Fern asked her to photograph his son Daniel's wedding, Olive met the whole Carter clan and also the Harveys, the Carters' cousins. She began hanging around the "Neck," the little stretch of coast where both families live, looking for pictures and learning things about the community. She writes that she was drawn to the "ruggedness of the land, the richness of the life, [and] the intermingling of people of all ages." She also liked the clutter: the yards filled with small flowers, toys, bicycles, unfinished lobster boats, discarded stoves and laundry lines "appeal[ed] to [her] photographer's eye."[3] Olive tells me that some of her friends found her project "depressing," but she eventually left Cambridge to live permanently on the Neck and complete her photo series.
Through Olive's images and writing we come to know her friend Fern, a solidly built man with kind eyes and big glasses, who is self-sufficient and industrious and a clearly loves his family. We learn about Irene, the sole female fisherman in the community, who built her boat herself and named it after her son. We get a sense of how the people on the Neck rely on each other to help lay foundation, install septic systems, care for each others' children, or join in on community efforts to make money (like the women's wreath-making around Christmas time); how they help each other out during catastrophe--for example, dropping everything to help Raymond put together a new boat when his is destroyed in a fire. We learn about their self-reliance, how the family fought their way into lobstering, a hugely territorial business (they also catch scallop, shrimp, and pogeys, and dig for clams), and how the "Harvey skiff" drops them off at their boats every morning like a "seagoing taxi." And we get a sense for physical layout of a community filled with "cousins and cats and dogs and horses."
-Olive Pierce
I first came across Olive Pierce's photo series Up River a year and a half ago. The series is of a Maine fishing community, taken in gritty black and white, and I remember being struck by how intimate and revealing the images were; they were able to convey so much about who the people were and how they lived, making me feel as though I had a solid handle on what the community was like. And the photos are simply beautiful. When I found out that Olive lives in Rockland, only a few hours from Portland, I decided I needed to ask her for an interview. My recording device failed me, so I can't give you all the back and forths, but I wrote up what I learned from talking with this incredible woman.
When I show up at Olive's home, she is making her way up her icy walk, wearing a down jacket and using a ski pole as a cane. At 86, her body is slight, her movements delicate, but when I catch up with her just before she ducks into the house, she turns around and grins, slinging me a hearty, "HEY!"
We enter the kitchen, simple and spacious. There's a New Yorker on the counter, soup bubbling on the stove, and an airy breakfast nook set out for lunch with china in various shades of blue. And I'd thought I was going to have to skip lunch. I nestle my recorder between the serving platters, and we sit across from each other, eating our meal--"soup from a can doctored with tahini and rice vinegar," salad, cheese, crackers, focaccia, and, for dessert, orange slices and "German Christmas cake." She seems to watch my face for a reaction to this out of season dish, delighting to think I might really believe she is serving me two-month old cake.
Olive Pierce is a documentary photographer best known for her photographs of two families in a tiny Maine fishing community, which were gathered over the course of ten years living in the community and have been collected in the book Up River: The Story of a Maine Fishing Community. She chose grainy high contrast film for this series, and the resultant photographs are incredibly gritty and human, providing a rare and intimate glimpse into a community known for its insularity.
Let me emphasize the time-line: for ten years, Olive went out fishing with the Harveys and the Carters, attended their weddings and their funerals, and joined in their Christmas celebrations. She even slept over at their houses from time to time. This type of extended immersion is not unheard of in journalism--one thinks of Gay Talese and Leon Dash, of Ted Conover spending a year as a prison guard to report on corruption amongst prison employees. And yet this immersion is incredibly impressive: I heartily cheer on anyone who can dive completely into a project and then emerge from its gaping maw, years later, eyes shiny with adventure and a finished work in hand.
Even given the serious commitment of time, how did Olive navigate through the complexities of her subject to create something so candid? In her images, Olive manages to create a portrait that is neither saccharine nor patronizing, that sidesteps the romanticism typical to images of coastal Maine as well as the contempt and distrust that some show toward this poverty-stricken community. I figure it must have taken a pretty unique person to become welcomed into a community that has reason to distrust outsiders, and then to take intimate photographs of that community that are neither critical nor idealized, but simply straightforward.
Olive Pierce was born in 1925. She grew up in Lake Forest, an affluent suburb of Chicago, and went on to study English at Vassar. Afterward she traveled to Poland as secretary for a United Nations medical team. She saw firsthand the "rubbled ruins of Warsaw" and "stared dumbfounded at the piles of children's shoes at the death camp at Auschwitz. "[1] And she started taking photographs to document what she saw.
Olive got married and started a family, settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When her children were young, she picked up a camera again to take portraits of them. The process was nothing like it is today; few people had cameras and darkroom access was rare. Under the tutelage of Berenice Abbott, a photographer famous for her photographs of New York architecture, Olive learned how to develop film. Her first darkroom printing was done with a technique she calls, "Dark of the Moon printing;" with no studio at home, she would do part of her printing off site and then bring the prints home to finish. The transport could only be done on the few days out of the month when there was no moon out. Eventually she learned to develop negatives at home, and her bathroom became regularly festooned with negatives, freshly developed and dripping dry.
Olive's early photos were, as I mentioned, mainly portraits of children. Using smooth film, she took spare, quiet portraits of her children, lingering in the doorway of the family's summer home in Vinalhaven, Maine, walking on the beach, standing together in a field. The portraits don't tell as much of a story as her later work, but they certainly have their own elegance and beauty. Neighbors and friends soon began commissioning Olive to take portraits of their children, and Olive's photography business was born.
In addition to studying with Bernice Abbott, Olive studied with Paul Caponigro, and also spent a year studying photography at Harvard. Olive credits her time at Harvard for nudging her toward the type of documentary photographs that typify her later work. For example, one of her first assignments was to pick a specific block in Boston and just hang out there, taking pictures--clearly a task bent toward the making of candid, everyday images rather than posed portraiture. The Harvard course also compelled Olive to branch out from taking pictures of children; asked what prompted this shift, Olive replies, somewhat tongue-in-cheek: "the professor forbade photos of children, and I didn't want to flunk."
In person, Olive has intelligent eyes and a dry wit. She takes time to think about what you say, and gives straight responses, occasionally tempered with a mischievous twinkle. After studying at Harvard, she was a high school photography teacher. Her first book, No Easy Roses, is a series of portraits of students from the inner city high school where she taught. One of her former students captures Olive's uniquely thoughtful approach, recalling his first day in her class: he asked where he should sit, and she paused, thought about the question, and replied, "sit wherever you think you might learn the most."
Olive first met Fern Carter, the central subject of her Maine photographs, in 1977. Olive's family owns property on Vinalhaven, an island off the coast of Maine, and summered there for many years. One summer night, while steering her boat home from a trip to town, Olive called out to a passing lobster boat, hoping to buy lobster for dinner. The lobsterman whom she'd hailed was Fern, and he invited her to a lobster haul. Olive returned this invite with an invitation for Fern to bring his family camping on her island. She recalls, now, that it was a "risk" to invite him; locals had been leaving litter on her island for a while, and she was taking a chance that the Carters might not treat her land with respect. But they maintained it very well. Fern started dropping buy for coffee and their friendship blossomed. Trying to get a sense of their friendship, I asked Olive what Fern might tell me about her, and she replies with a smile, "He'd say I handle a boat pretty well for a woman."[2]
Through Olive's images and writing we come to know her friend Fern, a solidly built man with kind eyes and big glasses, who is self-sufficient and industrious and a clearly loves his family. We learn about Irene, the sole female fisherman in the community, who built her boat herself and named it after her son. We get a sense of how the people on the Neck rely on each other to help lay foundation, install septic systems, care for each others' children, or join in on community efforts to make money (like the women's wreath-making around Christmas time); how they help each other out during catastrophe--for example, dropping everything to help Raymond put together a new boat when his is destroyed in a fire. We learn about their self-reliance, how the family fought their way into lobstering, a hugely territorial business (they also catch scallop, shrimp, and pogeys, and dig for clams), and how the "Harvey skiff" drops them off at their boats every morning like a "seagoing taxi." And we get a sense for physical layout of a community filled with "cousins and cats and dogs and horses."
For much of her adult life, Olive has been politically active, and has integrated this with her photography. She has documented political protests and rallies. And in the late nineties, she traveled to Iraq to take pictures of everyday life, adding a human side to extant media representations of Iraqi people (forbidden by the U.S. government from taking pictures, she took discreet shots with her camera low down by her hip). Olive has, it seems, strongly populist political leanings coupled with a natural contrarian bent, and this seems to have informed her Up River project. Carolyn Chute wrote text for the Up River book, and Ralph Nader wrote a blurb on the back.
Olive's goal with Up River was to give her audience a clear picture of the Harveys and the Carters. She expresses frustration with the limited views outsiders have of this struggling, poverty-stricken community, and writes, "I sometimes feel an overwhelming anger at the failure of society to make it possible for the people on the Neck to carry on their lives with dignity." Sitting across from Olive now, I get to hear her recount a story about her friend Fern; an outsider passing by Fern's place told him that his house was an eyesore, its roof all patched and ugly. He just looked her in the eye, Olive tells me, and said, "well, buy me the shingles!" Though at times her writing veers a bit too far toward idealizing her subjects---they are, in fact, people she considers friends--her project is largely very successful; she moves us toward a more intimate and complex understanding of who the Harveys and the Carters "really are;" with patience, "constant vigilance," a keenly observant eye and an ear for a good story, Olive is able to convey her subjects' wit, generosity, independence, ingenuity, loyalty, tenderness, and struggles--to wit, their humanity. And that in itself is illuminating, perhaps even revolutionary.
Olive's photos are archived in the Special Collections at Duke University. She is currently working on a memoir of her childhood.
[1] Pierce, Olive. Up River: The Story of a Maine Fishing Community. University Press of New England, Hanover, NH: 1996. p.vii
[2] Ibid, p.2
[3] Ibid, p.4
