Pine Tree Ballads

This sequence is my folktale: a weaving of imagination and reality—the twin forces that, more often than not, give shape to both history and family.

In the early 1900s, my great-grandfather settled on an island off the coast of Maine because it reminded him of his homeland in Sweden. Since then, my family has returned to Gray’s Point each summer for more than a century. He shared vivid accounts of the area’s early settlers—figures such as a one-legged ship’s cook, a widowed schoolteacher, and a Native American blacksmith remembered for both his ingenuity and his eccentricities. These stories—part historical record, part folklore—fueled my imagination, transforming creaking floorboards and shifting shadows into enduring ancestral presences.

Pine Tree Ballads, a decade-long photographic project, is a poetic memoir shaped by this inheritance of storytelling and magical realism.

At Gray’s Point, stories pass between the young and the old, becoming a constant narration of the landscape. Each generation creates and performs anecdotes, legends, and rumors that weave past and present into an evolving mythology. In these photographs, the shore, ladders, pine trees, boots, granite, stoves, stars, and gusting winds move beyond their physical forms to become symbolic extensions of my family’s history.

Over time, these images have entered the family record. They now sit among photo albums and the peculiar objects that accumulate in the farmhouse—quiet artifacts folded into the same evolving archive as the stories themselves. Perhaps one day, future generations will encounter them not simply as photographs, but as another layer of inheritance, inviting them to engage with their ancestors in a place where myth and memory remain inseparable. This sequence is my folktale: a story infused with imagination and reality, which are, more often than not, the true ingredients of history.