For a month or more the focus has been on teenagers. Yearbook deadlines and the high school sports seasons in peak playoff fever pitch have filled time with river banks, bridges, sidelines, and grandstands around the state. Senior portraits entail looking at one hundred and fifty frames, editing forty, and seriously working on twenty. A soccer game puts two hundred and fifty images in Lightroom.
But this week I returned to a pair of quiet old friends, oddly inspired by something I saw on LinkedIn.
This old house is at Pettengill Farm in Freeport. It is one of those time capsules run by a local historical society, in this case in Freeport, Maine. I’d stumbled to it while searching out new walks during peak pandemic social distancing. I discovered a lot of new places during pandemic perambulations but none hit the metaphorical mark more squarely than Pettengill Farm. An abandoned Farm House alone in empty in a field, surrounded by an ancient orchard, fallow fields, and a mower left where it stood after the last haying, gradually becoming one with the earth again. “Where, and why, did the people go?” writ large.
The same image edited using photoshop layers. The interior is black and white, the windows and reflections retain color.
The images themselves are nothing special. The building is locked, accessible a couple times a year for special events. Its folk art, scratched in the second floor plaster like 19th century cave art, invisible from first floor windows. Battling the reflections off the windows I just pressed the face of the camera directly against the window, maxed the aperture, went to 24mm, the widest the lens I had with me would go, and released the shutter. I would love to return with my 14mm.
From the start I liked these photos, it seemed there was a story there, a tale that might be extrapolated from the snippets about the place’s last residents provided by the historical society. But I never did anything particular with them.
Most intriguing is the contrast between the room and what is visible through the windows. The quiet stillness of the interior scene accentuated by the lack of color is not monochromatic, but nearly so. The only really color in the room is the deep red of the brick hearth and the browns of the floorboards and door. Even the latter only shows color where the sun comes through the window.
By contrast, the glimpses through the windows are vibrant. A bluer sky or a greener cedar is hard to imagine (by the way, the cedar tree featured through the window was reportedly brought to the property in 1934 from Great Island in Harpswell by Millie Petengill). The vigorous greening of late April tweaked by the western sun accent the radiant exterior. The transom in the front entry way fairly shouts “Spring.”
In April when I first looked at these images the meditative mood, being able to peak back in time like this, impressed me. I felt better about my walk. I’ve returned again and again, in person, and to the photos—just to look for a few minutes now and again. And I always wonder could they be more peaceful—would draining all the color from the interior enhance the 19th century feel? Would it draw Millie or Frank Pettengill from the shadows of that far room?
And here’s what October and November looked like. Click, they getter bigger.
