Portland Head Light

Author's Comments

The lighthouse is photographed so often that the challenge is no longer finding the composition. The composition is given. Stand on the rocks to the southeast of the keeper's house and you have made the photograph that thousands of others have made before you, and it will be a good one. The question is what you bring to it. I have been here in every season and the version I keep returning to is January. The crowds thin to almost nothing. The rocks go dark with cold spray and the white of the tower reads cleaner against a low winter sky. East-facing means morning, and morning in January at this latitude means a sun that comes up slow and stays low for hours, raking the keeper's quarters at an angle that summer never offers. The light is more honest in winter. It does not flatter. It describes. If you come in summer, come at dawn. Truly at dawn, not after breakfast. The park opens at sunrise and there is a window of perhaps forty minutes when the light is on the tower and the parking lot is still empty. By eight the buses begin to arrive. By ten the photograph is no longer yours. I will say this for the place. It earns its reputation. The rocks below the light are some of the most photogenic granite on the New England coast, and when a swell is running they make the foreground that the postcards never quite capture. Wait for weather. A clean blue-sky day here is the least interesting version. Give me fog lifting off the water, or a storm pulling out to sea, and the lighthouse becomes something more than its own image.

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