Lucid Dreams

Jack Montgomery
Maine Jewish Museum – Speigel Gallery
November 4 2022 – January 5 2023

When I was a boy, I had a lovely little sailing dinghy, no more than ten feet long. In the evening I took great pleasure running before the wind with the centerboard up, just skimming that surface between the bay and the beach, often scraping along the bottom ever so gently. As I grew older, I often found myself skimming between my dreams and my reflections while awake. The boundary between the two states has become porous, and it is in that space that my most satisfying images arise. What you see here are illustrations of the visions I find there. (Jack Montgomery)

Jack Montgomery is a photographer who has lived and worked in Freeport for many years. His subjects include portraiture and landscape. He writes, “I have an inexhaustible curiosity about the variety of ways to make images, initially with film and silver prints, but quickly expanding to salt, van dyke, photogravure and palladium processes. My latest fascination is paper and photographic composites. Photography sustains me. It gives me a means to record and share the many visions floating around in my head.” Jack has completed many portraiture series, including Maine’s Holocaust survivors, New York City firefighters in the weeks following 9/11, judges, fetishists, Italian villagers and young people coming of age on the Maine coast. His images are part of the permanent collection of the Maine Jewish Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris as well as various private collections.