Two photography shows up in Portland take distinctly different approaches to collecting.

“Recent Acquisitions in the Stephen K. Halpert Collection of Photography at UNE” (University of New England Art Galleries, through May 19) is an institutional collection concerned more with representing the breadth of photography, from its beginnings in the 19th century to now. “The Paula Tognarelli Collection” (Maine Museum of Photographic Arts, through May 25) takes a much more personal point of view in its assembly of images. Both are chock-full of exquisite gems.

As curator of UNE’s photo collections, Stephen K. Halpert is not immune to having a particular perspective. But institutional aims are different from those employed in building a personal collection. And here, Halpert has taken care to amass a wide range of photographic expression that chronicles the development of various techniques in the field, as well as the ever-evolving aesthetic concerns of the photographers who actually create the images.

The techniques range from photogravure (a method of transferring a photographic negative to a metal plate and etching it in, which was pioneered in the 1820s) to gelatin silver and archival pigment prints (created using paper treated with photosensitive silver salts suspended in gelatin, and a process using refined particles of pigment respectively – both developed at the turn of the century) to digital inkjet prints (which first appeared in the 1970s).

The loose rubric under which Halpert has convened the images here – almost 80 in all, filling the entire three floors of the galleries – are “scenes of daily life,” many taken by Maine photographers. But we can intuit some interesting sub-themes within the general concept. Some of the most affecting are romantic images that indicate the ephemerality of human existence on the planet.

Chief among these are the Czech Republic-born Anna Mikušková’s photos of cemeteries in Ireland and a dilapidated, collapsing old saloon in Alaska, and Maine-based Brendan Bullock’s photos from his “Newfoundland Ghost Towns” series (“Front Steps” are all that’s left of a home whose foundations are now overgrown with weeds; “Abandoned Mining Equipment” shows a wheel half buried in dirt and gravel).

There are also very painterly concerns behind several photographs. We are greeted, for example, by Barbara Goodbody’s “Sunrise in Rockport,” a large-format inkjet print whose soft focus and horizontal streaks of orange, white and yellow look like an artfully abstracted landscape painting. Freeport photographer Jack Montgomery’s photogravures have a grainy texture that imparts a misty romanticism to his images, even though they are shot in the present day. But his compositional eye is distinctly painterly. “Three Dancers,” photographed in Siena in 2018, evokes the ballet dancers of Edgar Degas, while “Eilidh in the Pasture” in Freeport from 2016 looks like a William-Adolphe Bouguereau or Jean-Francois Millet pastorale.

There are several images that rest somewhere between representation and abstraction, which is, in a way, also a painterly approach. Falmouth photographer Joanne Arnold’s extreme close-ups of boat parts at Gower Marine become color abstractions, as does Auburn photographer Tanja Hollander’s “When Morgan Was Sleeping,” a window in Barcelona that is really more about light, texture and geometry than recording an image of a window.

There are stand-alone images that fit no specific theme but can take your breath away. Camden artist Tillman Crane produced large-format black-and-white images that are stunning for their formal beauty (as in “Kiva Ladder, Pecos National Historic Park”) or their eye for the odd detail (“Methodist Campground Tabernacle” a tent camp stage with a sign reading “KEEP OFF THE STAGE, POLICE TAKE NOTICE”). They are by turns nostalgic, palpably quiet and still and, as in the latter, strangely American.

Jocelyn Lee’s vividly colored, razor-focused portraits are showstopping in their frankness. We have the sense we are peering into the inner lives of her subjects, which include her dying father, two shots of a woman named Gayle (one sitting in the garden and bald after chemo and/or radiation therapy, another in remission, sitting on her bed) or “Fiona and Michael,” two adolescents staring affectless, but perhaps confrontationally, straight at the viewer.

There are historic images such as Todd Watts’ of the World Trade Center being erected in the 1970s or Danny Lyon’s “The Line,” of Black convicts working a field with hoes under the watchful eyes of mounted guards. The show’s variety ensures that there will be something here to which you’re drawn, no matter what your tastes may be.

GETTING PERSONAL

Paula Tognarelli is the erstwhile director of the Griffin Museum of Photography in Worcester, Massachusetts, (a name that appears again and again in the image labels, as she was apparently helpless to the allure of works she curated into shows there and purchased several). The collection as a whole – there are over 70 images, which is just a portion of her holdings – is, like Halpert’s exhibition, a catalog of the limitless array of techniques that have proliferated since the origins of photography. As such, it showcases the seemingly infinite innovation that characterizes this art form in contemporary times.

To say the collection is quirky is an understatement. It abounds in whimsy and humor (exhibit A: a mixed-media work by Holly Roberts called “Sperm and Egg” that features the titular tadpole-like male reproductive cells with human heads). But the collection also embodies an exploration of Tognarelli’s own psyche that emerges as deeply, poignantly personal.

The collector, for instance, has talked about struggling with depression. It should come as no surprise, then, that there are many images that feel reflective and, at times, quietly unsettling. Edie Bresler’s “Anonymous” is a Van Dyke print (a method of printing that yields a particular brown color associated with Flemish Baroque artist Anthony van Dyck) of an androgynous prone figure lost in moody contemplation whose clothes and the birds flying above the figure are detailed with colored embroidery.

Along these same lines: Aline Smith’s “Fugue State #12,” a corrupt digital scan with Cyanotype overlay on pigment print, appears to show a young girl trapped inside someone’s head. David Whitney’s pigment print “Solitude” depicts a woman in an audience singled out from the rest of the people by an anomalous up-light of some sort, conveying a sense of loneliness within a crowd.

Birds are everywhere, often standing in – it would seem – for some dream of freedom. Eva Timothy’s “Freedom song,” for instance, captures a little girl, arms spread wide with joy after releasing a pigeon into the air. Likewise, Anne Plessens manipulates images to give a little girl’s head, arms and torso a bottom half that is a single bird wing, and shows her gliding above a marsh. Rhonda Lashley Lopez’s “Flying in the rain” and “Transcendence” both depict birds (a pair of egrets and what appears to be a kind of raptor, respectively) soaring through space. Wendi Schneider’s “Flamingo,” Diane Udelson’s “East African Crowned Cranes,” Susan Lirakis’ rear view of a woman wearing a blouse with bird wing designs on its back walking toward the sea – flight as metaphor threads through the entire exhibition.

There are also rabbits, which are personal talismans arising out of a specific memory. The day Tognarelli’s wife died, a fluffle of rabbits gathered outside her window, some curiously trying to get in. Hence Kate Breakey’s sepia-toned photogram “Antelope, Jack Rabbit” or Jennifer Shaw’s “Hare and Hound” chine-collé photogravure.

Tognarelli has also amassed many scenes of idyllic and/or idealized landscapes, which feel like refuges of the mind. Among the most beautiful is “The Egret Trilogy” – obviously also including birds – three scenes of a marsh printed with pigment on vellum and white gold leaf, the latter giving the images a kind of ethereal glow. Marcy Juran’s “Misty Morning,” Valerie Burke’s “Rocky Mountain Trees,” Richard Alan Cohen’s “Moonlit #1” – all these and more emanate a dreamlike quality suspended somewhere between the waking reality of life and something more heavenly, peaceful and eternal.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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