Motif Number 1

Author's Comments

The most painted building in America, they say, and I believe it. I have stood on Bradley Wharf at six in the morning in late September and watched four other photographers set up tripods within twenty minutes of my arrival, all of us angled slightly differently, all of us after roughly the same thing. The shack is small. The crowd that gathers around it is not. And yet it keeps earning the attention. What makes Motif Number 1 work as a photograph is the red. That particular shade of barn red against the granite wharf, the gray-green water of the harbor, the pale northern sky - it is a color story that almost composes itself. Early morning is when the facade catches direct light and the harbor goes still enough to give you the reflection. By midday the angle is wrong and the water is busy with traffic. By evening the shack is in its own shadow. I have come to prefer the view from Bearskin Neck across the harbor, where the shack reads smaller and the lobster boats and buoys do more of the work. The wide composition is more honest to the place than the tight portrait everyone makes. October is my favorite month here. The summer crowds have gone, the light has sharpened, and the working harbor feels like a working harbor again rather than a postcard. Bring a polarizer for the reflections. Come early. Stay long enough to watch the light move across the red boards as the sun climbs, because that change is the photograph, and it happens faster than you expect.

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