CAMDEN, Maine — Close to a hundred people squeezed into a cramped library meeting room Tuesday night to glimpse 32 black and white photographs not seen in decades. The pictures, showing Maine’s coast as it used to be, were all made by long-dead Rockland photographer Kosti Ruohomaa.
Until last fall, the famed photojournalist’s work languished in storage inside a New Jersey warehouse. That changed when the Penobscot Marine Museum acquired the bulk of Ruohomaa’s negatives last fall.
The show at the Camden Public Library is the first time the pictures have ever been on display. It’s just a small taste of the 50,000 or so Ruohomaa negatives now being sorted and cataloged at the museum. Museum photo archivist Kevin Johnson estimates that only ten percent of the photographer’s work has ever been seen.
“We do this every year,” said Johnson of the show at the library. “We’ve never had a crowd as big as this. He really left his mark on the state and especially this area.”
It’s an impressive feat for a photographer who died almost sixty years ago.
Ruohomaa was a photojournalist during the golden age of picture magazines in the 1940s and ’50s. He shot assignments all over the world for publications like Look, Life, National Geographic and Ladies Home Journal. But he’s best known for his realistic pictures of Maine.
Shying away from pretty postcard images, he documented the true face of rural Maine and showed it to the rest of the world. He worked for the famed Black Star photo agency in New York City for almost his whole career.
After Ruohomaa’s death in November 1961 at the age of 47, Black Star kept a tight grip on Ruohomaa’s entire archive of prints and negatives. However, a letter last year from Johnson, Ruohomaa biographer Deanna Bonner-Ganter and a few of the photographer’s Maine relatives, convinced Black Star to send his work back to Maine.
Black Star struck a deal to send all of Ruohomaa’s prints and negatives to the museum in Searsport. The agency is retaining publishing rights, but the museum is free to research and exhibit the work. It’s also planning to scan and upload the famed shooter’s work to a searchable online database. It will be free for the public to browse and enjoy.
“The museum is the right place for it,” said Bonner-Ganter, “where it will be cared for — for eternity.”
Ruohomaa’s previous biggest exposure, since his death, came from a 1977 book called “Night Train at Wiscasset Station” by Ruohomaa and writer Lew Dietz.
Johnson and Bonner-Ganter worked together in choosing the images for the Camden show, which runs till the end of the month.
“I wanted things that were not in ‘Night Train at Wiscasset Station,’” said Johnson. “I wanted something different.
One 1958 image shows Aunt Carrie Maker, then 92, knitting by a window. Maker’s silver hair is pulled back tight from her lined face. She’d been widowed twice by lobstermen husbands.
Another 1958 picture on display features Port Clyde lobsterman Floyd Conant and a dog. Conant sits in a fish shack wearing rubber boots, a cigarette burning in his hand.
Famed American painter Andrew Wyeth, a good friend to Ruohomaa, makes an appearance in another print. Taken in 1951, a man named Ralph Cline rows Wyeth in a small wooden boat. They were on their way to Loud’s Island.
After the photos leave the Camden Public Library at the end of the month, they will appear in a larger exhibit at the Marine Museum all season, from May to October.
While researching her Ruohomaa biography, Bonner-Ganter turned up a piece he wrote for the American Society for Magazine Photographers’ annual in 1959. It sums up Ruohomaa’s approach to photographing Maine and its people.
“Much (of Maine) is hidden in the offbeat nooks and crannies, for this is the way of life that is fast vanishing,” he wrote. “It is somewhat regrettable that the traditional individuality and nonconformity of the Maine man is a disappearing trait. Fortunately, too, there remain in the state, a number of cantankerous, stubborn individuals who spit with disdain at the notion of being vitaminized into conformity. Theirs is the stuff that puts life blood into dead hypo [a photo chemical] and ointment in the camera shutter.”
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