Rockland photographer Kate Greene stood near a pond in Massachusetts where a young girl disappeared years ago and covered her lens with an infrared filter. The scene through the camera became completely opaque to her naked eye.

So she didn’t see the picture she made until much later.

“Once I’m in the studio, it’s revealing something I could not see in the moment,” she said. “It is literally translating something that is beyond the visible.”

That photograph is included in a new book titled “The Haunted: Contemporary Photography Conjured in New England,” released this month by Speedwell. The nonprofit previously ran a gallery and residency program in Portland, but closed that space in January. This project is the first under Speedwell’s new model, which focuses on publications and pop-up exhibitions.

“The Haunted” shows the ways in which 21 photographers use their practice to reveal the mysterious and magical in New England. Jocelyn Lee, one of the founders of Speedwell and the curator of this project, said she wanted to explore the way artists can be haunted by their own need to create.

“Why do artists make the work that they do?” Lee said. “What compels them to keep making it, especially when they’re doing it in strange and mysterious ways? If you ask them, ‘Why are you doing this at this time?’ They might say, ‘I’m not. I don’t even know, but I’m compelled to do it.'”

The glossy 159-page book also includes poetry by regional writers and statements by the artists that reveal the secrets behind their images. Speedwell has also organized a panel discussion on the night before Halloween, as well as two overlapping exhibitions in Portland.

“Making one book a year feels like we can accomplish the mission of Speedwell, but in a much more manageable way,” Lee said. “We don’t have to fundraise so significantly. We don’t have to pay for a brick-and-mortar structure. We don’t have to pay for staff. So our hope is that this is a more flexible model that will be much more sustainable without exhausting everybody involved.”

FERTILE GROUND FOR CREATIVITY

This book is distinctly New England.

Lee weighed the contemporary photography of the region against the version of Maine that sometimes shows up in tourism brochures and travel blogs.

“I was thinking of the work that was in this book, and how deeply mysterious and personal it is,” she said. “I was thinking about the idea of what it means to be compelled to make these strange works against all odds. It just led to ‘The Haunted,’ and it is really meant as an antidote to that idea that New England is lighthouses and lobster bakes.”

The book also invokes a particular history of the area — that early Puritanism that stoked fear of witchcraft and a desire for conformity. Lee challenged that history by pairing the images with poetry and prose dating back to the 17th century. The book is dedicated to “those who find New England fertile ground for creation.”

On one page is an image Barbara Bosworth created by mounting a camera on a clock drive, an instrument used by astronomers to track a single object in the night sky. She wrote in her artist statement that the resulting images might be a reminder of the stars for those who cannot see it due to light pollution. On the next page is a poem by Emily Dickinson: “One need not a chamber—to be Haunted—”

“The photographers and poets of ‘The Haunted’ envision a different New England, teeming with wonder and unexpected eccentricities,” Lee and her husband, Brian Urquhart, wrote in an essay in the book. “Open, curious, and accepting of difference, they challenge us with existential questions about what it means to be alive on this planet.”

PHOTOGRAPHY AS ALCHEMY

Lee noticed that many of these artists were using the technology of photography to create strange and revealing images. That’s why she included statements from the artists that might illuminate how they make certain things happen with their cameras. (The section with these writings is called “Conjuring Revealed.”)

Caleb Charland is inspired by science experiments, his father’s DIY sensibility and the woods of his childhood. One of his works in “The Haunted” is a pair of images he made using a process called color separation, which allowed him to make color images with black-and-white film. He left a tripod in the same spot and shot dozens of negatives with different exposures to record the sky at all hours between May and October. The resulting image is vibrant, overlapping seasons and time of day.

“It’s mixing all the possibilities of photography together, freezing time in a very quick shutter speed and compressing time through very long exposures,” Charland, who lives in Brewer, said. “It blew my mind the first time it worked.”

‘BEYOND THE VISIBLE’

Lee also noticed that many artists worked in the landscape in intimate ways. They walk in the woods and put their hands in the dirt and sit with the deer. One such artist is Greene.

“Part of my work has always been looking at landscapes that have complicated histories and unresolved narratives,” she said. “Oftentimes, I’m looking at landscapes where history and grief and beauty are all kind of entangled.”

The image included in the book is a place she has visited and photographed many times. For another body of work, she spent hours in what is known as New England’s most haunted forest. She recalled a trend during the Civil War era, when early photographers claimed they could capture spirits with the camera. She’s not interested in the paranormal, but she sees how that history is connected to modern photography.

“In many ways, people have thought of (photography) as a kind of evidence, and using it as an investigative tool,” she said. “For me, the way I use it is probing at what’s beyond the visible and what’s beyond the surface of things.”

Greene’s not a ghost hunter. But she wants to see something more.

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SEE ‘THE HAUNTED’

“The Haunted” is $65 and available to order at speedwellprojects.com.

PANEL DISCUSSION AND OPENING PARTY

Anjuli Lebowitz, curator of photography at the Portland Museum of Art, will moderate a discussion on Oct. 30 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the museum with five artists whose work is included in “The Haunted.” Reserve free tickets at portlandmuseum.org.

The night continues with an opening party and book launch, open to the public, at Light Manufacturing, 121 Cassidy Point Drive, Portland. from 7 p.m. to midnight.

POP-UP EXHIBITIONS

Moss Galleries, Falmouth. Oct. 17 through Nov. 29. elizabethmossgalleries.com

Light Manufacturing, Cassidy Point, Portland. Oct. 24 through Dec. 1. cassidypoint.com