Invisible No More | Maine Photographer Séan Alonzo Harris

Maine photographer Séan Alonzo Harris brings often-overlooked members of our communities into focus.

By Mel Allen

Oct 06 2020

Séan Alonzo Harris’s “Voices in Our Midst” project was initially inspired by images he took of children that conveyed both their innocence and their inner world.

Photo Credit : Séan Alonzo Harris

The story of the images you see here begins with a 7-year-old boy who wanted to remember the most important people in his life. Séan Alonzo Harris grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but when his parents divorced his father moved to Washington, D.C. On a Christmas visit there, young Séan asked his grandmother for a tape recorder so he could take the voices of his father and relatives back home. Instead, she handed him a small plastic camera. “You can record with this,” she told him.

The photos he took he would put on his wall. “It kept them close to me,” Harris says today. “That was the beginning of my love of photography.” He is 52 today, and he still has that first kid’s camera—“one of my greatest treasures.”

He won photography awards as a teen, and after art school he worked as a photo assistant in Boston and then New York before settling in Portland with his wife in 1995. “I found a welcoming art community there,” he says.

Get Your FREE Guide to Autumn in New England!

As a Black artist in one of the country’s whitest states, Harris was acutely aware of inequality. In the summer of 2017 he began a series he would title “Voices in Our Midst,” focusing on the people who lived in and around Portland’s Kennedy Park, the most diverse neighborhood in Maine. “The first thing that grabbed me was the collision of haves and have-nots,” he says. “There are new houses, expensive condos, high-end restaurants on the outskirts. But so many have no access to it. You can’t miss it. And there are many new Mainers from other cultures. I thought, What does that mean? How can I show that?”

The first image Harris took for the project was of a young boy on a bicycle (above). “That was the beginning for me to honor the people in this neighborhood. I wanted them to be seen.” Over the next few years, his hours and images in Kennedy Park grew, and the photos were featured in exhibits.

Last winter, before Covid-19 intervened, Harris was in residence at Portland’s Indigo Arts Alliance, which offers creative time and space for artists of color. There, he reread the Ralph Ellison classic, Invisible Man. “This really resonated with me,” he says. “I knew I needed to go deeper on being Black in America.”

“Voices in Our Midst” continues, as does “I Am Not a Stranger,” portraits of new and old Mainers in Waterville, where he settled two years ago with his wife, Elizabeth Jabar. Today Séan Alonzo Harris is one of Maine’s most celebrated photographers, an artist whose gallery shows are bona fide events. (Cove Street Arts has planned an exhibit of his work in spring 2021.)

But at heart he remains that 7-year-old boy, determined to use his camera to honor the “people I’ve photographed who are proud, intelligent, beautiful people. But also almost forgotten.”

“The harmony between the two girls brought me joy,” Harris says of this photo. “After someone said something to them, they walked away still holding hands. This image asks the viewer, What do you see? Is someone scolding, or just giving information?”
*Photo Credit : Séan Alonzo Harris*

Taken in 2018 and now part of “Voices in Our Midst,” this photo shows a young boy using a bicycle-powered cider press at Portland’s Cultivating Communities, a refugee resettlement program.
*Photo Credit : Séan Alonzo Harris*

“I was struck by this girl’s sassiness,” Harris says of this 2017 image, “when she approached me and said, ‘Take my picture.’”
*Photo Credit : Séan Alonzo Harris*

Invisible No More | Maine Photographer Séan Alonzo Harris — Fox Field’s basketball court in Kennedy Park became a favorite backdrop for Harris, “the rhythm of basketball” his inspiration.
*Photo Credit : Séan Alonzo Harris*

Always aware of the visual tensions that were happening “between the games,” Harris made a series of basketball photos in 2017, including a number featuring this young man, whom he knew as Francis.
*Photo Credit : Séan Alonzo Harris*

“She seemed to be investigating me,” Harris says of this little girl he photographed at the Fox Field basketball court. “I’m focused on the hoop and the curvature of lines and she walked into the image. She made the shot.”
*Photo Credit : Séan Alonzo Harris*

Nyawal Lia
*Photo Credit : Séan Alonzo Harris*

Maya Williams
*Photo Credit : Séan Alonzo Harris*

Erick Kibonge
*Photo Credit : Séan Alonzo Harris*

Nyny Deng
*Photo Credit : Séan Alonzo Harris*

While feeling his way as a new resident of Waterville, Harris began a portrait project called “I Am Not a Stranger.” He took 58 portraits of generational Mainers as well as new arrivals. “I wanted them to feel like VIPs.” Shown here: Regina Santos, a member of Waterville’s century-old Lebanese community.
*Photo Credit : Séan Alonzo Harris*

Aspiring musician Cooper Boardman, who lives near Waterville in the town of Oakland, Maine.
*Photo Credit : Séan Alonzo Harris*

Salix, Annick, and Dore Munezero, sibling and immigrants from Burundi who are part of the increasing diversity of Waterville, Maine.
*Photo Credit : Séan Alonzo Harris*

To see more of Séan Alonzo Harris’s work, go to seanalonzoharris.com.

Mel Allen

Mel Allen is the fifth editor of Yankee Magazine since its beginning in 1935. His first byline in Yankee appeared in 1977 and he joined the staff in 1979 as a senior editor. Eventually he became executive editor and in the summer of 2006 became editor. During his career he has edited and written for every section of the magazine, including home, food, and travel, while his pursuit of long form story telling has always been vital to his mission as well. He has raced a sled dog team, crawled into the dens of black bears, fished with the legendary Ted Williams, profiled astronaut Alan Shephard, and stood beneath a battleship before it was launched. He also once helped author Stephen King round up his pigs for market, but that story is for another day. Mel taught fourth grade in Maine for three years and believes that his education as a writer began when he had to hold the attention of 29 children through months of Maine winters. He learned you had to grab their attention and hold it. After 12 years teaching magazine writing at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, he now teaches in the MFA creative nonfiction program at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Like all editors, his greatest joy is finding new talent and bringing their work to light.

More by Mel Allen