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As a senior, it’s hard to acknowledge that until this spring, I had never been to Popham Beach, especially considering that I have stayed in Maine for two summers. From my friends I had heard plenty about it as an exemplary Maine beach. So, when I first encountered John McKee’s photo of the entrance to Fort Popham, I was quite taken aback. The juxtaposition of the coastline’s natural beauty with the trash and pollution in the foreground rattled me. Everything feels like a scene from an Auden poem: “how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster [. . .] But for him it was not an important failure.”

John McKee was not a Mainer. Growing up in Wisconsin, he spent his formative years in New Hampshire, Belgium, and New Jersey before arriving at ����ֱ�� as a French instructor. With an avid interest in visual storytelling, McKee was soon discovered by then-BCMA director, Marvin Sadik, who commissioned him to photograph the environmental pollution in 1965. The resulting exhibition, As Maine Goes, opened at the BCMA in 1966 to critical acclaim, leading to an ecological revolution in Maine. On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the creation of this photographic series, Frank Goodyear, the co-director of the Museum, and I decided to revisit both the photographs and the places where McKee had been. A re-photograph series not only joins this critical conversation across generations but also underlines the current fragility of Maine’s ecosystem as we examine the contribution of As Maine Goes and its contemporary environmental movements in the 1960s and ’70s.

So, there I was, standing at the exact same spot that McKee had occupied 60 years prior. The idea behind his original composition now became clear to me. By accentuating the curvilinear outline of the beachside, McKee created an implied line that guides the viewer’s attention from the near left of the frame to the far right, contrasting the manmade environmental disaster with the pristine landscape for which Maine is known. This difference is made even more apparent by color and proportions: the splashes of white on the cars stand in direct opposition with the somberness of the forest in the background. Meanwhile, with McKee’s use of a wider lens, the foreground––the wreckage of cars and their jagged shape––becomes disproportionally exaggerated, compared to the uniform outlines of the new cars on the road. The tension builds: not only was the detritus of the manmade encroaching on the natural but newly manufactured automobiles were rapidly replacing older ones. Crops of cordgrasses left on the left side of the picture, untouched by the pollution, appeared both precarious and hopeful. How much longer, McKee seemed to ask, until the trash filled up the rest of the beachside? Was intervention possible?

Luckily, McKee’s very images inspired precisely the response that was necessary. When I stood at the same location in the spring of 2025, barely any traces of rubble and refuse remained. Much like McKee, I’m not a born Mainer myself. However, in my conversations with various contributors to the Maine environmental movement in the ’60s and ’70s––Professor Orlando Delogu of the University of Maine Law School, Professor Richard Judd, an environmental historian at the University of Maine, and the Smith family of Freeport, to name a few––I’m constantly surprised by those who serendipitously arrived in Maine and stayed on to keep up with the fight. In Time of Decision, a pamphlet from the symposium McKee convened after As Maine Goes, he quoted one of the panelists, who suggested that “the success of his town’s shoreline protection program was due basically to an attitude of this is my town, this is our beach, this is our heritage. With that attitude widespread, he told us, the job was almost laughably simple.”

Refocusing my attention on the beachside, I think back to this sentiment: “this is our heritage.” The first-person plural is simultaneously an admonition and an invitation, prompting our response today, five decades later.

Chris Zhang ’25
Student Curatorial Assistant