BY CARL LITTLE

With its pink-hued cliffs and island-dotted views, Acadia National Park has inspired a bounty of memorable images. This summer, the Gallery at Somes Sound is featuring work by two photographers dedicated to Acadia: Mary Louise Pierson (1954-2024) and Thomas Blagden, Jr. In their individual ways, they highlight aspects of the park that remind us of our good fortune: to be able ramble and recreate in this wondrous place.

Born in Chicago, raised in New York City, Mary Louise Pierson, the granddaughter of Nelson Rockefeller, earned a BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. She studied photography with Ann Parker (1932-2022), who produced remarkable books on folk art with her husband, writer Avon Neal (1922-2003).

Pierson collaborated with her mother, writer/activist Ann Rockefeller Roberts (1934-2024), on two books, “The Rockefeller Family Home: Kykuit” (1998) and “Mr. Rockefeller’s Roads: The Untold Story of Acadia’s Carriage Roads and Their Creator” (1990). For the latter volume she contributed color photos for a special section devoted to the park. Along with scenic views, she focused her lens on the bridges and an “artfully constructed” culvert built from hand-cut stones.

Among the works on view this summer are several of the Rockefeller gardens, atmospheric images of intimate spaces. Other photos present Bass Harbor Light and other iconic park vistas. A painter as well as photographer, Pierson knew how to frame a landscape to optimize our experience of it.

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor. (Photo by Mary Louise Pierson)

Bass Harbor Light (Photo by Mary Louise Pierson)

Like Pierson, conservation photographer Thomas Blagden, Jr., has a long relationship with Acadia National Park going back to boyhood visits with his great aunt Zelina Blagden (her home is now the site of the Indian Point Blagden Preserve). Over time he has become an eminent chronicler of the park, most notably through “First Light: Acadia National Park and Mount Desert Island,” which won the 2006 National Outdoor Book Award, and “Acadia National Park: A Centennial Celebration,” published in 2016 (royalties from its sale benefit Friends of Acadia).

Blagden finds beauty everywhere: the spiraling petioles of lily pads on Long Pond, a glacial erratic on Cadillac Mountain, two baby loons perched on a parent’s back on Jordan Pond. His sense of light comes to the fore in Golden Canopy, a brilliant shot of the illuminated tops of trees.

In an interview in the Bangor Daily News at the time of his centennial collection’s publication, Blagden noted how we can lose our sense of wildness “because everybody has become so disengaged with the natural landscape.”

Feeling connected, he stated, “makes us feel caring, and that is what drives the most effective conservation, ultimately.”

Elsewhere, Blagden has written, “The more finite the area, the better, for that intimacy fosters creativity.” The ultimate goal, he explained, is to attempt to know a place so well that, citing writer Barry Lopez, “one wears the landscape like clothing.”

Blagden’s and Pierson’s photographs invite us to don Acadia attire in all its glorious plenitude.

“Golden Canopy” (Photo by Thomas Blagden)

“Parenting” (Photo by Thomas Blagden)

CARL LITTLE, of Somesville, received the Lifetime Achievement Award for his art writing from the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation in 2021. He and his brother David Little’s “Art of Acadia” came out in paperback this year. Their latest, “Art of Penobscot Bay,” is available from Islandport Press.