By Amanda Estes

Staff Writer

Mason Philip Smith, a fine art photographer, said cameras are not
responsible for taking pictures. Tapping his head, he said, “It’s the
gray matter,” that allows him to recognize and translate the character
of his subject into a digital image.

    “You crystallize on the essence of the thing,
whether it’s a person or a scene or light and shadow or color and then
you make it work for you,” he said.

    The Cape Elizabeth resident is currently exhibiting
a collection of 38 prints, which offer images from two places at
opposite ends of the earth. Half of the images are the result of a
“really good shoot” in Newfoundland last year and the other images come
from his travels throughout Asia. The exhibit opens tomorrow (Sept.1)
and runs for the entire month of September at the Sherman Hines Museum
of Photography in Liverpool, Nova Scotia.

    The exhibit speaks to the eclectic mix of images that Smith has captured over the years.

A photographer since high school, Smith said he studied magazine
photography at Boston University. For 40 years, he had a commercial
photography studio in Portland.

    After he closed the studio in 1996, he made an
excursion to Russia, which resulted in the volume of images, “Towards
Arkangel’sk.” Smith said the trip was a revelation of sorts as he found
himself taking photographs of a journalistic nature, which was
something he had never really done before.

    “To my astonishment, all of a sudden this stuff from
years before came back and I just started photographing in a
journalistic manner,” he said. “It came out of nowhere. All of a sudden
I knew what to do-I hadn’t done it for years – and I just did it.”

    Smith’s has captured images from all over the world,
but he has a fondness for China’s “centuries old culture.”

    Smith’s first trip to Asia was to serve in the Korean War. He recalled returning to the country in 2000:

    “When I was there at the end of the war, everything
had thatched roofs,” he said. “Now they’re all tile roofs and where
there were bare mountains in those days – they reforested everything.
If you tell a young Korean person that those used to be bare – they
don’t believe you because they’ve only known forest there.”

     Smith has traveled to Asia nearly every year since
2000. The Sherman Hines exhibit features images from Thailand, China,
Japan and Vietnam. Lately, Smith said he is drawn to China’s Yunnan
Province, a southwest region bordering Vietnam, Laos and Burma, because
of the people and their sense of tradition.  

    “There are people in native costume – their daily life they conduct in their native costume,” he said.

    Smith scrolled through a collection of his digital
images and paused briefly to provide a context for each photograph. He
paused on an image of a Shani woman in China, in her native dress, and
recalled the brief encounter that resulted in a photograph that seems
to depict a woman who has been aged by hard work or the elements.

    “This little old woman appeared out of nowhere while
I was photographing a rice field and tried to sell me a fossil and I
said, ‘No,’ and she disappeared,” he said.

    In another photograph, taken in Hanoi, Vietnam; a
boy leans over a boat to trail his hand along the water’s surface. The
image represents another chance encounter.

    “I was in a water village [and] he glided past me,”
he said. “A man in Harpswell bought this photograph and he wanted to
know how I posed that. I don’t pose people. What you see is what you
get, but what you get is the real person.”

    In his shoot in Newfoundland last year, Smith sought to capture the province’s “small town” character.

    “It has an untouched, natural flavor [and] some of
the houses are quite colorful,” he said of his attraction to the area.

    While driving through Newfoundland, Smith recalled
coming across a small stream with a waterfall behind it, running into a
meadow. As he was photographing the stream, a man came up to him and
asked, “Have you got the waterfall?”

    “I said, ‘Yes, it’s right there. I took a picture of it,’”Smith recalled.

    The man, however, insisted that Smith had not
captured the waterfall. Smith accompanied the man to his home and they
walked through the woods.

    “We [came] out on a ledge with an immediate drop off
and opposite us was a 100-foot waterfall just roaring, right out of the
woods, dropping down into the pool,” he said of the discovery.

    More locally,  Smith’s photographs, taken in
the 1960s, of Maine colonial gravestone carvings are part of the Maine
Historical Society’s collection. His documentary photographs of Maine
buildings are also part of the Maine Historical Preservation
Commission.

    “They’re not really architectural – they’re to show
what Maine used to be like before there were yellow arches everywhere,”
he said.

    In November, Vox Photographs, an online gallery,
will feature Smith’s photographs of Maine in the 1960s and 1970s.

    “I’m quite excited because I thought they would be
more well known after I’m long gone, but now here I’m still around and
all of a sudden these pictures have appeared,” he said. “It’s the sort
of thing somebody would discover in the archives in a hundred years.”

    Smith said his interest in early American history
seems to be leading him back to documentary photography. He spent a
recent weekend photographing buildings in Athens, Maine. Instead of
photographing in black and white, Smith said he is now working with one
color and creating 16 by 20 panographic images.

    “I’m very interested in getting back to documentary
photography so another generation can see what Maine looked like,” he
said. “You know you can drive anywhere in Maine and it looks so
familiar to you now because you’ve lived here all your live,” he said.
“The thing is to stop your brain and think about what you’re looking
at.”

    For more information about Mason Philip Smith and his work, visit www.voxphotographs.com.