By Amanda Estes
Staff Writer
Mason Philip Smith, a fine art photographer, said cameras are not responsible for taking pictures. Tapping his head, he said, “It’s the gray matter,” that allows him to recognize and translate the character of his subject into a digital image.
    “You crystallize on the essence of the thing, whether it’s a person or a scene or light and shadow or color and then you make it work for you,” he said.
    The Cape Elizabeth resident is currently exhibiting a collection of 38 prints, which offer images from two places at opposite ends of the earth. Half of the images are the result of a “really good shoot” in Newfoundland last year and the other images come from his travels throughout Asia. The exhibit opens tomorrow (Sept.1) and runs for the entire month of September at the Sherman Hines Museum of Photography in Liverpool, Nova Scotia.
    The exhibit speaks to the eclectic mix of images that Smith has captured over the years.
A photographer since high school, Smith said he studied magazine photography at Boston University. For 40 years, he had a commercial photography studio in Portland.
    After he closed the studio in 1996, he made an excursion to Russia, which resulted in the volume of images, “Towards Arkangel’sk.” Smith said the trip was a revelation of sorts as he found himself taking photographs of a journalistic nature, which was something he had never really done before.
    “To my astonishment, all of a sudden this stuff from years before came back and I just started photographing in a journalistic manner,” he said. “It came out of nowhere. All of a sudden I knew what to do-I hadn’t done it for years – and I just did it.”
    Smith’s has captured images from all over the world, but he has a fondness for China’s “centuries old culture.”
    Smith’s first trip to Asia was to serve in the Korean War. He recalled returning to the country in 2000:
    “When I was there at the end of the war, everything had thatched roofs,” he said. “Now they’re all tile roofs and where there were bare mountains in those days – they reforested everything. If you tell a young Korean person that those used to be bare – they don’t believe you because they’ve only known forest there.”
     Smith has traveled to Asia nearly every year since 2000. The Sherman Hines exhibit features images from Thailand, China, Japan and Vietnam. Lately, Smith said he is drawn to China’s Yunnan Province, a southwest region bordering Vietnam, Laos and Burma, because of the people and their sense of tradition.  
    “There are people in native costume – their daily life they conduct in their native costume,” he said.
    Smith scrolled through a collection of his digital images and paused briefly to provide a context for each photograph. He paused on an image of a Shani woman in China, in her native dress, and recalled the brief encounter that resulted in a photograph that seems to depict a woman who has been aged by hard work or the elements.
    “This little old woman appeared out of nowhere while I was photographing a rice field and tried to sell me a fossil and I said, ‘No,’ and she disappeared,” he said.
    In another photograph, taken in Hanoi, Vietnam; a boy leans over a boat to trail his hand along the water’s surface. The image represents another chance encounter.
    “I was in a water village [and] he glided past me,” he said. “A man in Harpswell bought this photograph and he wanted to know how I posed that. I don’t pose people. What you see is what you get, but what you get is the real person.”
    In his shoot in Newfoundland last year, Smith sought to capture the province’s “small town” character.
    “It has an untouched, natural flavor [and] some of the houses are quite colorful,” he said of his attraction to the area.
    While driving through Newfoundland, Smith recalled coming across a small stream with a waterfall behind it, running into a meadow. As he was photographing the stream, a man came up to him and asked, “Have you got the waterfall?”
    “I said, ‘Yes, it’s right there. I took a picture of it,’”Smith recalled.
    The man, however, insisted that Smith had not captured the waterfall. Smith accompanied the man to his home and they walked through the woods.
    “We [came] out on a ledge with an immediate drop off and opposite us was a 100-foot waterfall just roaring, right out of the woods, dropping down into the pool,” he said of the discovery.
    More locally,  Smith’s photographs, taken in the 1960s, of Maine colonial gravestone carvings are part of the Maine Historical Society’s collection. His documentary photographs of Maine buildings are also part of the Maine Historical Preservation Commission.
    “They’re not really architectural – they’re to show what Maine used to be like before there were yellow arches everywhere,” he said.
    In November, Vox Photographs, an online gallery, will feature Smith’s photographs of Maine in the 1960s and 1970s.
    “I’m quite excited because I thought they would be more well known after I’m long gone, but now here I’m still around and all of a sudden these pictures have appeared,” he said. “It’s the sort of thing somebody would discover in the archives in a hundred years.”
    Smith said his interest in early American history seems to be leading him back to documentary photography. He spent a recent weekend photographing buildings in Athens, Maine. Instead of photographing in black and white, Smith said he is now working with one color and creating 16 by 20 panographic images.
    “I’m very interested in getting back to documentary photography so another generation can see what Maine looked like,” he said. “You know you can drive anywhere in Maine and it looks so familiar to you now because you’ve lived here all your live,” he said. “The thing is to stop your brain and think about what you’re looking at.”
    For more information about Mason Philip Smith and his work, visit www.voxphotographs.com.