KENNEBUNK, Maine — Cruising in her mini Clubman down Route 35, Donna Kabay brakes for barns.
“Oh look at that one. I like the windows,” she said, pulling her car into a dirt drive and grabbing her Nikon.
Attracted to the weathered, timeless magnetism of this roadside barn, tucked behind pine trees, the photographer stalked the red and white structure as intently as a nature photographer would a giant blue heron wading in a river.
“There can be something really beautifully romantic and poetic about the way the building and the plants around it interact with each other,” she said between rapid clicks of her shutter.
“I love the way there are windows missing at the top and in such a lovely pattern,” she said.
The Kennebunk photographer started a barn series a year ago to immortalize “the beautiful things that represent the countryside.” And 14 barns from York to Biddeford have captured her attention.
Some barns she photographs are inhabited, others abandoned. She doesn’t know their heritage. Nor their owners.
“I don’t care to know the truth about them,” Kabay said. “I want my interpretations to be my truth.”
An aging red and white barn with broken windows just off a busy road near her studio is merely the latest that draws her in. Others, such as the animal barn next to a boat-building school in Arundel, have become so frequently visited, “it’s like an old friend,” she said. Driving around York County, Kabay has found no shortage of barns suitable for framing.
“I like the classic look of it and that there are animals,” said Kabay, who sometimes shoots the chickens that come to greet her at one stop. “It’s become a part of my life because I drive by it so much.”
Though her subjects are static, that doesn’t mean they are easy: The Pittsburgh native doesn’t always get them right.
“The barn is an object, but there is really a lot around it, too, its aura,” which the self-taught photographer strives to tease out in her photographs, she said.
“Maybe it’s my classic idea of what I love about a barn,” she said while shooting a favorite barn across the street from a golf course. “Its relationship to its environment, how it looks with the two trees. The idea that they are having a conversation and agreeing makes me smile the whole time I’m taking photos of it.”
This series, on display at her gallery Phosart Photography at the Galleries at Morning Walk in Kennebunk, started as everyday places, “things I drive by every day where I see bits of beauty and turn it into something that other people can appreciate too.”
Driving by one stripped down wooden barn at the curve of a country road, she said that “there is a story in that one, but I haven’t been able to tell it.”
Kabay’s past career as a landscape architect helped her develop an eye and “understanding of how to make the leap from instinct to a more refined perspective for what has potential.” And barns offer unlimited scope for her searching lens.
She portrays them in all seasons and weather. From foggy mornings to brilliant autumn afternoons. Always with the intent to convey a mood and feeling.
“They have mystery and history,” said Kabay, who is reminded of walking with her grandmother on a farm as a girl and seeing grasshoppers jumping. “There is more to it than that, but that’s what I am looking for.”
And barns are testimony and guardians of that feeling — a harmony that represents a countryside changing fast.
“It’s an environment that’s relaxing that we don’t get to experience much anymore,” she said. “A lot of what I do is an emotional response.”
