A Maiden's Voyage: The Magical-Realist Photography of Patrisha McLean

Although I adore children, I dread it whenever a proud parent pulls out a commercial portrait.  I brace for the inevitable: kids wearing blindingly-bright clothes and posed against a garish background, staring at me with frozen smiles. 

My confused eyes look everywhere except at the children's faces.  And the people who produce these ghastly images call themselves "Children's Photographers"?  They'd be better off photographing still-lifes.

Recently, however, I discovered someone who is a children's photographer in the true sense.  Patrisha McLean of Camden, Maine creates magical, realistic portraits of children using her artist's eye, her journalist's experience and her keen love of nature. 

McLean's outdoor portraits focus on her subjects' expressions and personalities.  For this photographer, children are not only an object of love but also a beautiful manifestation of nature, to be studied in detail and have their images preserved for eternity.

During her photo shoots, McLean enters her subjects' world.  Instead of directing kids, she encourages them to run around and be themselves, play dress-up, and generally take the lead in their own photo session.  She'll even run after the energetic kids, which is no easy task when you're toting a large professional film camera!  Patrisha McLean's spontaneous, un-posed portraits are the antithesis of garish department-store photos.

 Like many children's photographers, McLean became interested in portraiture after becoming a mother.  Her early portraits (opposite), though unrefined in comparison to her later work, reveal an uncanny ability to capture un-posed innocence.  

This little girl, with her sleepy eyes and drooping rose, looks as if she just got out of bed and has no idea what she's doing in a photograph.  The image fades away at the edges, like its subject's fleeting youth.  This monochrome portrait is so heart-breakingly shy and sweet that it becomes an indictment of the ugliness of commercial color portraits and their failure to capture the essential beauty of children.

As McLean's interest in portraiture grew, she began studying photography and taking pictures of her children's friends.  Within a few years, she became a professional. 

Wisely, Patrisha McLean has never attempted to work in color.  Her universe is a monochrome universe of children romping in fields, thickets, and woods full of natural light and texture.  McLean's gorgeous commissioned portraits never fail to capture the ephemeral nature and magic of childhood.

Though she still does commissioned work on a limited basis, McLean is now focusing on her fine art series Flower Girls, with the intent of publishing a book in the near future. 

 The major theme emerging from the Flower Girls series is McLean's fascination with the journey of the maiden, from birth through adolescence.  Throughout her career, as McLean's work progressed and her own children approached adolescence, her portraits of young girls became increasingly complex, symbolic, and even dark.

Nora with Old Roses (2003; left) is a lovely but simple comparison of a young girl with the heirloom roses McLean loves. 

In contrast, Riley with Old Roses, Dreaming (2006; right) is a more complex study.  There's more visual motion in this portrait, perhaps suggesting impending womanhood and its monthly ebbs and flows. 

Riley is dressed in black and her eyes are closed.  If McLean didn't tell us otherwise with her title, we'd assume that she's dead.  And, of course, that's part of McLean's point-- the girl must die in order to make way for the woman.

As McLean's work continued, her backgrounds became more threatening and the girls' expressions more grim. 

Often, I find her playing with our expectations of seeing a "Flower Girl" in the traditional sense-- at a wedding.  At first glance Frances with Old Roses (2006; left) could be a portrait of a little girl in a wedding party. 

But as I look more closely, I wonder why Frances' expression is so tense and the trees in the background seem so scary.  Is it because someday soon, if she survives the difficult road to adulthood, she'll be the "de-flowered" bride and not the Flower Girl? 

In Clara with Rhododendrons (2006; right) the background is even more oppressive, and Clara, wearing a veil and a tense expression, is pressed and stifled by the vegetation around her.  She seems about to disappear from view.  Her torturous road to adulthood seems to weigh heavily on McLean's mind.

McLean's magnum opus, however, is her 2002 portrait Hillary with Hydrangeas.  The first time I saw this portrait, I gasped with astonishment.  Is this Dante's Beatrice, gazing calmly at me from a place of eternal darkness?  Will the shadowy background swallow her?  Or will the bright, angel-shaped flowers, which Hillary holds out like a candle, protect her? 

McLean has produced something I would never have thought possible-- a portrait of a Goth Flower Girl.  Light and dark, yin and yang, are in perfect balance.  A picture of a girl holding flowers somehow transcends its original meaning to become a statement about the dualistic nature of our universe.  

Beware of Patrisha McLean's work.  It's potent.  If you spend too much time looking with it, you may never again be able to look at a department-store portrait.

Patrisha McLean's book of her written portraits, containing photographs and interviews of adults in her community, will be published in 2009 by Down East Publishing.

All photographs copyright 2008 by Patrisha McLean, reproduced with her permission. Image resolution has been lowered for online publication. To contact McLean or see more of her work, click on the link below.

Related links: http://www.patrishamclean.com/ , http://www.irocp.com/ (International Registry of Children's Photographers), http://www.downeast.com/ (Down East Publishing Company)

Special thanks to Michael Robinson and John David, who spent hours poring over McLean's work and helped me to understand its transcendent beauty.