Maine Women: Living on the Land

Maine Women: Living on the Land will be shown during the Maine International Film Festival in Waterville. Click on the promotional postcard above to enlarge it.

"I started this photographic project in 1996 in an attempt to understand the community in which I have spent the last twenty-six years as a part time resident," writes Lauren Shaw, photographer/film producer of Maine Women: Living on the Land. The community Shaw is referring to is North Belgrade, where she has a summer home on Great Pond.

In reaching out to women of Maine, Shaw interviewed many, selected ten, and combined love of portrait, landscape, and storytelling into a photographic exhibit and a CD-ROM. The women are diverse in age, location, landscape, and lifestyle yet all have lived most of their lives on the land, all have a sense of place, of community and of the legacy of family tradition of work.

"It is about what happens to the land we live on that creates the spirit and soul of a place," Shaw relates.

Shaw's celebration of this relationship between land and home through visually and orally "mapping" their landscapes is intended to touch a personal empathetic chord in everyone.

"The stories these remarkable women share through this exhibition and accompanying DVD have a common thread in their sense of community and legacy of family traditions of work," describes Shaw. "It is my hope that this exhibition will inspire the audience to look at the relationship they have to their personal surroundings and how it impacts their communities."

This summer, a lot is going on for Shaw and Maine Women: Living on the Land. The photographic exhibition is opening on August 6 at Rockland's Farnsworth Museum, which is also publishing her book on the project. The film will be presented on Tuesday, July 19, at 6:50 pm, during the Maine International Film Festival at the Railroad Square Cinema. Five of the ten women in the film will be present and will hold a panel discussion following the film. Maine Public Radio will be recording the event.

For more information about the project visit www.laurenshaw.com.

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Maine Women: Living on the Land