Kosti Ruohomaa, Lobstering off Monhegan Island, 1956

I like this postcard because it reminds me of home. I identify with the photographer, who grew up in Maine in the same town that I did and studied painting and drawing at the Boston School for Practical Art. Ruohomaa worked briefly as an animator for Disney in Los Angeles before becoming a photographer and drinking himself to death at the age of 48. Before this image was reproduced as a postcard it appeared as an illustration in a National Geographic article. I spent a winter living on this island and working on one of these boats as a sternman. It was an incredibly repetitive and monotonous job most of the time, but the scenery wasn’t bad. There were certain moments during hauling when we were working so quickly and smoothly it became almost like a dance. I get a kick out of knowing that at one point I was on a similar boat within 500 yards of where this picture was taken. Last time I went back to the island I ran into my old captain at the town dock. When I told him I was moving to Los Angeles he looked at me like I was crazy.

Peter Holzhauer, Photographer

Oreste Albertini (my grandfather), Self Portrait, 1940-45

It is an odd thing for me to be the same age now as you are in the picture. There have been more or less just as many years between today and the day you were buried, with your head on a pillow I had embroidered with blue thin chains. I was seven then. Here your profile is parallel to the painting on the easel, the painting parallel to the mountains and the landscape’s reflections. This photograph is so clearly composed, framing the scene. There is such a vivid foreground that the background fades like a mirage, and puts my mind on a seesaw; indifferent to the natural scene, almost choked by the certainty I can still read your mind. The space, the colors of depth, the coarseness of rocks are seemingly immaterial. Painting was more than nature for you; it was space in the form of time. Although your hand holding the brush is now a ghost hand, your paintings are not, and neither is the blue bond unfathomable.

Rosanna Albertini, Writer