Ever since his mother gave him his first camera—a small Ansco Shur-Shot Jr. with one shutter speed—so that he could take photographs when he went away to summer camp, Peter Ralston has been documenting his world. He still has that first album of photographs, and the Ansco, which he uses periodically, convinced that, if necessary, he could be content exploring what his old, simple camera is capable of.
For decades, Ralston shot Kodachrome with a 35-mm Nikon, but these days it’s a digital Canon, which, he explains, allows him to “paint with pixels.” It has always been important to him to present the reality that he experiences as he shoots. The photographs in his book Sightings, shot in his film days, are not cropped or altered, no enhancements. And he works much the same way with digital, although he says he loves the printing process even more, finally able to fire on “all eight cylinders, instead of four.”
The oldest of three boys, Ralston grew up in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, on the Brandywine River, with his dog and a boat and an insatiable curiosity for all things nonacademic.
His education was and is, he says, “being out there, just doing it,” except for a brief workshop he took in 1971 with Ansel Adams—and having the great fortune to grow up living next door to artist Andrew Wyeth, his wife, Betsy, and their family.
Directly out of high school, Ralston left home with his camera, establishing himself as a freelance commercial photographer in New York City. One day, he might be shooting rubber gloves for an advertisement and, another, stills for The Today Show. But in 1978, the Wyeths issued what Ralston calls an edict: “You are coming to Maine this summer,” and he did. He spent the summer with them in Cushing, and returned the next and the next, always staying a little longer—until he didn’t leave.
In 1983, he cofounded the Island Institute, which, in addition to its work advocating for and honoring Maine’s islands and their communities, also publishes Island Journal, most of its photographs taken by Ralston. He has photographed Port Clyde and Frenchboro, Criehaven, Rockport, harbors and islands, lobstermen, fishermen, the people he passes and talks with every day, their children and grandchildren, a flock of sheep headed to Allen Island. He photographs the world he loves and lives in.
The littoral zone is where the sea meets the land, and what interests Ralston is where people meet and coexist with this environment. His photographs are stories, and in these stories what he wants people to understand is how rare and how special this place and its people are. With over 5,000-plus miles of saltwater-influenced coastline, and less than 20 miles of working waterfront, “with all due respect to the puffins and the right whales, that’s the endangered species,” he says.
His photographs have been published in 34 books and over 50 magazines, including Architectural Digest, National Geographic, Newsweek, and Smithsonian, and are part of the permanent collections of the National Museum of American History, the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), and the Farnsworth Art Museum, among others. His work is also exhibited in many museums and galleries. For over 30 years he has been the Wyeth family reproduction photographer.
A new edition of the book Islands in Time, with text by Philip Conkling and photographs by Peter Ralston, has just been released. This summer, Ralston Gallery opened on Main Street in Rockport with the working harbor visible through its front window.
You register place in a very human way.
I hadn’t thought about it like that, but I guess it’s true [he looks around the gallery]. Here’s a simple picture of a lobster boat. The boat was sitting out in the harbor. The guy’s son had been killed, and there was the boat, the only boat in the harbor, and it was trapped in the ice. It was sort of broken, and it was maintaining its own circumference. Being in that circle of water and ice struck me—emotionally, not visually.
You grew up in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. We know that as Wyeth country.
Andy and Betsy [Wyeth] bought the other half of the property my parents had, the mill side of the Brandywine River. So I grew up with these guys. And I have spent my life as a photographer trying really hard not to look like or ever be accused of being an Andy clone or an Andy knockoff or an Andy wannabe. But I was definitely influenced by Andy and by Betsy.
In what way?
They were honest and could be brutally direct. Each of them, in their own way, said, go deep, be open, and do it right. And so I want what I do to count.
What do you remember from your childhood that shaped your photographic eye?
Well, I desperately needed glasses, but no one knew that, and so I was 9 or 10 when I was catapulted into a stunning, shocking, brilliant visual world. I’m like a visual raccoon. I’m so curious about everything.
You used to work exclusively with Kodachrome, and now you work digitally. How did that come about?
Actually there were six years when I didn’t pick up a camera at all.
Really?
It’s hard to believe now, but really. After Sightings came out [1997], I felt like I was at an artistic crossroads. A quandary. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And then I was very suddenly in the land of a life-threatening illness. I had a stroke in the middle of what should have been a simple surgery, and so this eye didn’t work, this hand didn’t work. Lots of things on the port side didn’t work so well. Then they found a rare tumor, one people don’t recover from, and short story is, uppercase G or lowercase g, I had a miracle.
But I wasn’t taking pictures. Finally some friends asked me to recommend a digital camera. They were going traveling, they said. I told them, and they bought it. For me. How could I not get back on the horse then? And so six years after I shorted out, I knew what I wanted to do.
And that was…?
To do what I love. Just more of it. I could spend the rest of my life in Penobscot Bay and never run out of things to discover and explore. I could continue to go deeper and deeper. Just as Andy always said.
How do you work now?
I try to be invisible. That hasn’t changed. And I still want to get it right when I shoot it. I’m out in the world in the same kind of way, just knocking around with a camera—I haven’t really talked about this before—but somehow, and it’s hard for me to put my finger on it. But I feel more open. I’m more present.
Is there anything you’ve learned about yourself from being on the back side of a camera?
I’ve learned that I’m good at something and to trust that more. I’ve never had any formal education—just a workshop in my 20s. I did a lot of work in New York, but when I came here, I gave it all up. If I was going to do anything, it would be here. I knew that. It’s between me and this place. There’s this word, querencia. A friend explained it as a place that imparts a profound and absolute sense of belonging. That’s where I live. And that’s where I work.
What’s a typical day like?
I don’t know about typical, but I can say there’s my personal life. Every day has family and friends. My wife, the kids I have, this community—that’s life-sustaining. And then there’s this work. I get up early and go out when the light is sexy. And then, of course, there is the printing, the moment of truth.
Do you have to take risks to take good shots?
There were two photographers killed in Lebanon yesterday. Photographers of violence, war, human dysfunction, they take risks. I take some, but nothing like that. Hanging out of a plane, getting too close to huge waves at Schoodic. Winter is edgy and icy and risky. My abiding fear is that I’m going to jab a branch into my eye. But ultimately what you do is what’s necessary to get the shot.
What are you working on now?
Andy used to say, “Peter thinks with his lungs.” But I’m not this time. It’s a big project, but all I’m willing to say right now is—and I guess Andy would not be surprised to hear this—it’s about staying in place and going deeper.
