Maine pictures of Gordon Parks and John McKee present the surprising

That’s the place Herklas Brown got here in. Brown was the proprietor of that institution. It was in Somerville. Somerville had fewer than 300 residents, and the shop was its solely enterprise. Brown was additionally postmaster and, along with his brother, drove the native snowplow. He and Somerville may have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell illustration. It was simply the form of healthful affiliation Esso prized.

Parks struck an skilled stability between evoking American timelessness and honoring the digital camera’s realist precision. Epitomizing that stability is {a photograph} of a hay wagon being drawn by two oxen outdoors of Brown’s retailer — with an Esso gasoline pump outstanding within the foreground (so’s a Coca-Cola signal). A extra delicate nod to custom is {a photograph} of Mrs. Brown filling a lamp with kerosene (one other petroleum product). There was nothing quaint or antiquarian about her doing so. Somerville, although simply 15 miles from Augusta, the state capital, lacked electrical energy.

Augusta was one other of the locations Parks photographed in Maine, together with Portland (the harbor), Pittsfield (a coaching facility for Navy aviators), Windsor (a county truthful), Skowhegan (farmers). By Maine requirements, he didn’t rack up the mileage, however he managed to cowl an terrible lot of territory.

Parks was doubly an outsider there. Born in Kansas, he’d lived within the Twin Cities, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York. A Mainer he was not. Parks was additionally Black. At the time of his go to, Maine had a Black inhabitants of lower than one-tenth of 1 p.c. Fewer Black individuals lived within the state in 1940 than had in 1840.

Yet usually the extra clearly somebody is an outsider the extra simply she or he would possibly acquire acceptance. Metaphorically, these pictures really feel up shut, not shot from a distance. Also, Parks was famously gregarious and fascinating. Large as his expertise was — he composed music and would later take up portray, turn out to be an acclaimed creator, and direct movies — his persona could have been even bigger.

The exhibition features a {photograph} of Parks with Brown, his spouse, three daughters, stepdaughter, and granddaughter within the household residence. The second appears pure and unforced. Inevitably, the 2 males within the {photograph} register as white and Black. They may register simply as properly, and no much less precisely, as two pipe people who smoke. Finding commonality got here naturally to Parks.

John McKee (1936-2023) was in another way an outsider: an Illinois native, educated at Dartmouth and Princeton. But after arriving at Bowdoin to show French, in 1962, he stayed in Maine the remainder of his life. McKee introduced his newfound allegiance with “As Maine Goes,” a 1965 picture essay that makes up some two-thirds of the almost 70 photos within the present exhibition.

The pictures mix castigation and warning with a way of saddened surprise. The fantastic thing about coastal Maine is proven sullied by deserted vehicles, billboards, drainage pipes, trespassing indicators (all of the extra discordant for being nailed to bushes). The proven fact that a lot of what we see is in any other case so lovely makes its sullying all of the extra grievous. McKee’s dismay, even disgust, is palpable. If Old Testament prophets had had cameras, McKee would have been Jeremiah.

The title performs off of an previous political adage. Maine used to elect its governors in September. So the end result of these elections was for a few years seen to foretell the vote in November: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” Political in a really totally different method, the implication of McKee’s title is evident, that the environmental depredation here’s a warning for elsewhere. This was three years after publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and the identical 12 months as passage of the Highway Beautification Act. McKee’s pictures have been very a lot of the second.

In addition to the 1965 Maine pictures, there are later ones of the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community and Japan (each chime with the chasteness of McKee’s personal pared-down aesthetic), in addition to France, Corsica, and Crete. In a pleasant tribute to McKee’s educating profession, a vitrine accommodates a studying listing from certainly one of his programs and a last examination.

Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) was that particular mixture of insider and outsider, the summer time resident. A photographer and filmmaker, he lived a lot of the 12 months in New York and had a house in Searsmont. He made these three brief movies in and round his home. “Daisy” (1966) is in black and white. “The Apple” (1967) and “The Caterpillar” (1973) are in colour. They really feel unmediated and look unemphatically lovely — that’s to say, they’re lovely with out calling consideration to their magnificence (tougher to do than it sounds).

Each makes use of sound to wonderful impact, however in another way: a Schoenberg piano piece for “Daisy,” a music model of a Kenneth Koch poem for “The Apple,” birdsong for “The Caterpillar.” Both “Daisy” and “The Caterpillar” may precisely, however incompletely, be described as nature movies: pictures of clouds and bushes and greenery and, after all, a daisy in a single and caterpillar within the different. Shot in stop-motion, “The Apple” differs from them in providing a mini-narrative: The title merchandise is ambulatory! Consider the probabilities. Burckhardt did, and fortunately so.

“Hello, Stranger: Artist as Subject in Photographic Portraits since 1900” is simply what it subtitle says. The present closes Aug. 10. Unlike the others, it will appear to bear no relation to Maine.

The present attracts on a current donation of 230 pictures to the museum. The temptation is to explain all the 30+ pictures on show, they’re that eye-catching. Let three suffice.

A younger David Hockney warily eyes Cecil Beaton’s digital camera. Brassaï appears to be like a bit like his fellow Hungarian, Peter Lorre, in Israel Bidermanas’s 1945 portrait. In a really amusing six-photograph sequence, “I Build a Pyramid,” Duane Michals does simply that, with some well-known Egyptian ones within the background.

Wait, possibly that gives a Maine connection for the present. There’s an Egypt in Hancock County. So add worldwide Maine to the listing. As Maine goes, so goes the world.

GORDON PARKS: HERKLAS BROWN AND MAINE, 1944

JOHN McKEE: AS MAINE GOES

RUDY BURCKHARDT: Three Maine Films

HELLO, STRANGER: Artist as Subject in Photographic Portraits since 1900

At Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 255 Maine St., Brunswick, Maine, by Nov. 9 (“Hello, Stranger” by Aug. 10). 207-725-3275, bowdoin.edu/art-museum

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Mark Feeney may be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.