Grace Cho
From City Lights to Crashing Surf: A Historical and Photographic Survey of Maine's Coastline
Advisor: Connie Chiang and Matthew Klingle
"From City Lights to Crashing Surf" will examine the seeming disjunction between past and present by comparing historical photographs with present-day conditions during one Maine summer. Ms. Cho will travel up and down the Maine coast, conducting research and taking photographs in five locales: Portland, Freeport, Bath, Camden/Rockland, and Bar Harbor. Portland will represent metropolitan Maine, in the center of what many experts now identify as one of the most rapidly urbanizing regions in the Northeast. Freeport's famed organic Wolfe's Neck Farm and string of retail outlets will provide contrast with its former incarnation as a coastal farming community. Industry will be the focus in Bath, where Ms. Cho will compare the age of wooden shipwrights with the present-day era of mechanized shipbuilding. Tourism and fisheries are the theme for Camden and Rockland, which try to balance, often with great difficulty, the two activities today just as they did a century ago. Bar Harbor, at the end of the journey, will represent the ultimate extension of tourism in contemporary Maine with nearby Acadia National Park illustrating the continuity of efforts to protect the scenic coastline from developemnt.