Front window

Tanja Hollander sees the light

By Jenna Russell

“SARAH AND MIKE'S WINDOW. NORTH YARMOUTH, MAINE,” 2001, print, 19”x19”, by Tanja Alexia Hollander.

When she ran into a creative block a while back, Portland photographer Tanja Hollander made a list of things she considered important. Her morning ritual, coffee by the window, showed up on the list, and surfaced in her consciousness as potential subject matter.

Hollander’s photographs of windows have been widely seen this year, in shows at the Portland Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA. The latest in the series, windows at Portland’s Victoria Mansion and the McLellan-Sweat House, can b» seen at Boston’s Miller/Block Gallery September 8 through October 3. The photos of the McLellan House, now being restored as an addition to the museum, will be shown there this winter.

A resident of Portland since eighth grade, she returned six years ago after graduating from Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she pursued photography and feminist studies. Her early portraits of sex workers were followed by self-portraits, and reevaluation of the “realness” of photography. Far from representing truth, she said, it’s “just as false as painting” in its nearness to reality.

Her latest work is about “trying to pare down the subject matter, so it appears simple,” she said. The window pictures are reduced to bare essentials — light, and curtain-cloth or screen, to show off light to best advantage. The subject is hardly groundbreaking; as long as there have been doors and windows, artists have been drawn to these passages between brightness and dark. As symbols, windows have limitless potential, and in memory, their views often stay with us, from childhood bedrooms, trains, or hotels. Hollander takes ordinary scenery and imbues it with seductive freshness. Her close-up studies of screens or lace curtains make the subjects familiar but foreign, the way a fork or a hand, immersed under water, looks suddenly strange.

Always on the lookout for new windows, she was thrilled at the chance to shoot in the Victoria Mansion, the 19th-century brownstone villa famous as a prime example of Italianate architecture. She gained access as part of a MECA student project at the mansion, and discovered unimaginable excess. “It was so over-the-top, I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “It was sort of a dream come true: old windows, blown glass, lace curtains, shutters . . . I shot 20 rolls in an hour.” Caretakers opened the house in early morning so she could capture the light.

“We all look at the mansion from the outside, driving by, and she was on the inside looking out,” said ICA Director Mark Bessire, who incorporated some of the images in the city-spanning “Domestic Culture” exhibition this spring.

At the Portland Museum of Art, where her work is well-known, Hollander was a natural choice as one of several artists invited to document the transformation of the McLellan-Sweat House, a 200-year-old Federal-style building being restored as galleries and a study center.

Then 28, Hollander was the youngest among the handful of artists showcased in “Local Color: Six Contemporary Photographers” at the Portland Museum last winter. When curator Aprile Gallant asked her to be in the show at the end of a studio visit, “I seriously almost fell off my chair,” Hollander said.

In April, while “Local Color” was still showing upstairs, the 2001 Biennial opened on the first floor of the museum. Hollander’s work was also chosen for that exhibition. The jury selected 58 artists from more than 800 who submitted work.

“To be in the museum is a different story,” she said of the experience. “The stenciling on the wall really got me.”

Her four Biennial entries, all square, color prints measuring 19-by-19 inches, included “Holiday Inn by the Bay,” a view through a window screen, and “When Noah was Sleeping.” In the latter, gauzy curtains filter the green glow of sunny grass outside the window. The landscape is obscured, reality blurred by distance that imitates the distortion of dreams or memory.

The new show includes work sometimes cropped almost to abstraction, as with the skyward-angling wooden spokes between Palladian window panes, stark lines against white light outside. “Sarah and Mike’s window, North Yarmouth,” is the most disarmingly beautiful of the new photographs, its transparent pink and yellow curtain-panels awash in pale, delicate light. Elsewhere, bluish window-light reflects off old porcelain, and shuttered glass trades glare for evocative, golden-brown dimness.

Since the Boston gallery began representing her a year and a half ago, Hollander has been selling more work, but not enough to support herself, and she works part-time for her father, a Portland lawyer. Many of her artist friends from college are in Boston or New York, but as her own career picks up momentum, she has no plans to join them. She has rooted herself here, establishing the Bakery Photographic Collective earlier this year with four darkrooms and 15 members who share the costs of equipment.

A few hours before heading to New York for the weekend, Hollander was already laughing at the friends she knew would give her a hard time, as always, for living in Maine. “I drag them to the galleries and museums, and they haven’t been since the last time I was there,” she said. “What’s the advantage in having to work 50 hours to pay rent?”

Driven, with perfectionist tendencies, Hollander acknowledges her recent success has been a lot of work. She’d like to take some time off, but it doesn’t seem likely, given her guilt every time she goes to the beach.

The previous day, she celebrated her 29th birthday, an occasion that phased her not one bit. She planned to make the party last all week. “I look forward to growing old,” she said, with seagulls screaming in the background. “I can’t wait for my 30th.”

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.