Mark Barnette

Looking Closely

I try hard to make pictures that are beautiful and without sentimentality.

I was born in 1956 and grew up in Portsmouth, NH, with “The Family of Man,” stacks of digest-sized Coronet magazines from the 1940s with color reproductions of Renaissance paintings and black-and-white Edward Weston nudes, postcards of my hometown, art lessons, Modernist painting, Samuel Chamberlain’s “camera impressions” of New England architecture, and a succession of cheap Brownies and Instamatics. I have always made the kinds of pictures I make today.

I owe my current work to the relative low cost of digital imaging and pirated photo-manipulation software that make serious digital photography affordable. I shoot wherever I go, but I’m primarily interested in the landscape in and around Portland, Maine, where I live with my wife, Jodie.