Private beach

Verner Reed's summer postcards

by Jenna Russell

"New England Summer," photographs by Verner Reed at the Maine Photo Co-op, 100 Oak St. Open noon to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and noon to 5 p.m. Friday through Sunday. Call 774-1900.

HARD ROAD: Reed's photos remind us there is no one definition of summer fun.

In a culture as youth-obsessed and advertising-saturated as ours, it's easy to get the idea that summer is just for the young. (Not buff and bronzed? Get back in that sweater, fat boy.) Verner Reed's photographs, on display at the Maine Photo Co-op, remind us that a balmy breeze feels just as luxurious on wrinkled skin, and ice cream and balloons aren't just for kids.

"New England Summer" consists of 25 black-and-white photographs taken with Reed's trusty Leica in the 1950s and '60s, from Cape Cod to northern Vermont. The photographer's love of New England is obvious, and his sharp eye for the region's mundane moments and commonplace scenery reflects his origins in Denver, Colorado. It makes sense that an outsider would see more, and see it more clearly and fondly, than would a native of one of his favored small towns.

Reed's career is a testament to necessity, the mother of invention. As a furniture maker in Vermont after World War 2, he struggled to find someone to photograph his wares. He taught himself to use a camera, and ended up shooting for Life magazine. Offered a job with Time-Life in New York, he couldn't bring himself to leave New England, and instead developed a long-term relationship with Vermont Life magazine. Reed has also worked for years as a sculptor, and now lives in Falmouth.

The summers he documented weren't particularly leisurely; as one would expect of hardy New Englanders, they managed to keep themselves busy. There were taffy pulls and tug-of-wars, fairs and picnics, men mowing lawns and measuring fish, and not a single hammock strung between trees. One of the few pictures without physical motion is of the Dreamland dance hall in Tunbridge, Vermont, where a mixed cast of middle-aged characters loiters on the front steps. In a label for the photo, Reed writes that they're "waiting for the dance hall to open," but it's hard to imagine his subjects dancing. They're an unlikely, unromantic bunch, not at all dolled up, and each keeps to his own space, not risking interaction.

It's easy to see these pictures as relics of a bygone era, a slower, simpler time that was also more picturesque. In fact, a drive through northern Maine or Vermont would still turn up people with similar faces doing the same sorts of things. Reed was drawn to older ladies in hats and pearls; today, they might be wearing T-shirts and sandals, but they'd have the same unflappable, practical, kindly air about them. He also favored children, and they are always the same -- remarkably, immovably fixed in the moment.

Reed watched for instances of distraction, and few of his subjects make direct eye contact with the camera. In one photograph, two Vermont ladies sit on the stone steps of a church or meeting house, paper bags that might be full of peanuts in their laps. Their attention is directed left of center, and we're left to wonder if they've averted their eyes from the camera on purpose, out of discomfort at being the focus of attention. In another double portrait, a woman blows up a balloon, her one visible eye wide and almost playful behind it, while her female companion looks on with apparent disapproval, as though the taking of the photo is a scandal.

In most cases, even the prettiest picture has an edifying quality of journalistic distance. A little girl at a doll wedding wears a crown of daisies and a filmy white dress; she's like a sugar figure melting on top of a cake, but she's real enough to help in telling a larger story of childhood. Occasionally Reed taps a sentimental nostalgia that would be saved by specifics -- his soft-focus children on a swing are a universal, shorthand expression of innocence, long sapped of the power to be anything but sweet. But then there's the woman in black selling fudge (and pickles) from a booth at the country fair. She's a vivid individual, calling up a clear time, place and flavor that can't be dismissed as anyone's hazy daydream.

People take a back seat to nature, or semi-natural forces, in some of Reed's strongest compositions. A 1954 photo from Boston shows a city fountain, its white sheath of water and a froth of falling, man-made rain against a black background. One small boy stands up to his knees in water. The most abstract, mysterious image in the show was taken the same year in Stockbridge, Massachusetts: it's a gripping, spiraling view down into a hollow where a black dog churns muddy, shallow water, the liquid flashing, glinting white reflections. The dog, in silhouette, becomes an enigmatic symbol, like the white dog in some of Andrew Wyeth's paintings.

Much less mysterious is Reed's picture of a man at an auction. He sits glumly under an umbrella, a pile of teacups at his feet, some kind of napkin draped over his head. He could be an avid antiquer, depressed solely by the rainy weather, but his expression speaks to anyone who's been forced into a mall against their will. These are essential truths of a season when fun is expected: (A) New England weather doesn't always cooperate, and (B) everyone's idea of summer fun is not the same.

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