I Am Not A Stranger
In 2018, the photographer Séan Alonzo Harris relocated from Portland, Maine, his home of more than two decades, to Waterville. He found the move north and inland, to a small, post-industrial city, disconcerting. Harris is originally from Boston and had lived in New York City before settling in Maine. He knew Waterville as the hometown of his wife, the artist Elizabeth Jabar, but could it be his home too?
As Harris spent more time in Waterville, making the transition gradually, he developed a project designed to highlight the city’s diversity in partnership with Waterville Creates! and the Colby Museum. The provocative title of this endeavor, I Am Not A Stranger, is a proclamation of radical inclusivity couched, curiously, as a bracing negation. It is both a statement of identity and one artist’s entreaty to his subjects: I am not a stranger and neither are you. We can all belong. Let’s start here.
Harris photographed Watervilleans whose ties to the area go back generations and those, like him, who are just beginning to call it home. He listened to his subjects reminisce about the Waterville of their childhoods, express a mixture of excitement and concern for the future of the city, and share stories from their lives. He transformed unfamiliarity and doubt into curiosity and discovery. He demonstrated citizenship as a matter of participation and neighborliness.
The setup Harris created for the portraits was inspired by a painted corner structure that the twentieth-century photographer Irving Penn used for his studio portraits of celebrities. For Harris, the arrangement had an edginess that he liked and it created a common denominator for the project. He urged participants to make it their space.
