Just shoot me

Philip Rogers makes art of artists

by Jenna Russell

KING OF QUEENS: Rogers captures John Hultburg's regal bearing.

Photographer Philip Rogers is adamant that his portrait show at the Hay Gallery, "Artists in Maine," not be interpreted as a "who's who" of Maine art. Rather, it's a who's who of his own address book, a kind of visual diary of friends and mentors and artistic acquaintances whose work has, for whatever reasons, exerted on Rogers a magnetic attraction.

Each of the show's two dozen black-and-white portraits, which have never been shown before, hangs beside a drawing, painting or sculpture by the artist pictured. Being human, there's nothing we love like putting faces to names. Here we get the portrait beside the self-portrait, the face-first exterior view and the inside-out version. Rogers's vision is the glue that holds the still-developing survey together.

A Cumberland native, he made his first portraits in the 1970s, when he ran with a circle of young, talented artists. He took a break from the mid-1980s to the mid-90s to focus on his professional photography career and family, then attacked the project with renewed fervor in more recent years. The show mixes young, emerging Maine talents, like Patrick Corrigan and Rachael Eastman, with well-known names, like Maurice Colton, Rackstraw Downes, and Rudy Burckhart, who died this year and to whom the show is dedicated. As an example of his passion for the project, Rogers drove all night and slept in his car to make a meeting this year with successful painter John Hultburg in New York; and Rogers found only one of 100 pictures from the session captured the artist's regal bearing.

The earliest photographs are among the show's best, probably because of Rogers's close ties to his first subjects. Elizabeth Cashin McMillen seems to hide behind a sculpture, an ambivalent look in her huge, dark eyes. (Rogers calls her his "first love.") His good friend Bill Rand stands in murky darkness, his one well-lit eye a sharp-edged marble. Side-by-side, in Rand's own "Bank Shot," a 1985 print, pool balls catch the light and glint in a similar fashion. This is not the only portrait with a visual link to its partnered work; often Rogers has made a conscious effort to reveal an artist's preoccupations or process. He photographed Dianne Salfus in dense woods, and she seems to float on top of the thickly layered brambles, like the nude woman who floats in a kind of gray womb in Salfus's own exquisite, subtly layered drawing.

Sometimes the link between mediums is emotional. "Jazz," a painting by Leslie Mackin, is a precise purple dream -- its core is calm and solid, though its color is pitched beyond the real. Rogers poses Mackin with a fur stole and pearl-and-satin headpiece, props that threaten to derail the seriousness of the sitting. Yet Mackin looks down with such a quiet, prayerful look, the balance is preserved. Other portraits play with an artist's pet subjects. Robert Hamilton, whose paintings sometimes contain toy-like cars or wagons, appears in a beat-up junk car near his Port Clyde studio, a bearded pirate with his hand in a giant glove draped over the wheel.

Rogers, 47, is a boyish, exuberant presence, and when he talks about the show, he draws out the warmth and gossipy humor in some of the images. His portrait of Richard Wilson is a hilarious, storied standout that mimics one of Wilson's own erotically charged drawings. A couple embraces on one end of a couch in the artist's Portland studio, while Wilson lolls at a distance, his fleeting, bemused expression suggesting he might have just imagined them into existence. Another portrait is vivid with familial intimacy -- artist Rachael Eastman sketches one of her sisters while another sister leans against a wall, pregnant and shirtless. Eastman herself is a background figure, crouched on the floor in a corner like a shadow. Rogers chose the pose to reveal his subject's private, retiring nature.

Sometimes truth of character has to be drawn out. Rogers tells how he went to photograph his friend George Lloyd, and found the normally loud, animated painter hell-bent on striking dignified poses. "I had to do something to get the real George," he recalls, so he asked a seemingly innocent question about a museum show. Always opinionated, Lloyd "erupted in a tirade, arms flying out." That's the Lloyd we see in the show, lively and bold, the lines around his eyes betraying his joy in the performance.

And then there is the truth that seems to rise against the odds. At first glance, Rogers's portrait of Portland's Jen Gardiner seems to have entirely too much orderly, inactive space. The genius is in Gardiner's pose, her head tipped slightly to one side, her hands clasped primly in front of her. The school-marmish posture suits the tidy setting, the sewing machine and lit candle, and it suits Gardiner's work, her vibrant, delicate, woven-thread surfaces. The round rug she stands on seems to whirl in place, and her look is surprisingly steely, knowing, and vaguely resistant, behind her pursed lips and 1950s-style glasses. We feel bewitched, just slightly, but it must be said we see more through the camera than we ever would without it. Rogers's game of names-and-faces isn't played to impress -- he's more interested in learning who these artists really are.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.