Home and Away | Maine Photographer Greta Rybus

Spanning cultures and continents, Maine photographer Greta Rybus finds the threads that tie us all together.

By Mel Allen

Feb 27 2024

Ever since Rybus moved to Maine in 2011, she’s found endless inspiration in its rugged and beautiful landscape. In this image, taken on assignment for the state’s tourism office, she shows what Camden Harbor’s iconic Curtis Island Lighthouse looks like from inside a lobster boat’s pilothouse.

Photo Credit : Greta Rybus

When talking about a photographer, we often refer to their “eye,” as if what is seen through their lens explains what emerges for us as viewers. And the photos you see here certainly reflect the keen and restless eye of Greta Rybus, whose work has often appeared in Yankee as well as in many other publications. And with her brand-new book, Hot Springs (Ten Speed Press), her eye takes readers on a world tour of 14 countries. “Hot springs have helped shape the culture of these places—what does that look like?” she says.

But to understand the depth of Rybus’s work, you need to know as much about her heart as her eye, and how she is inspired to show how people care for their places, and each other.

Raised in the Mountain West with stints overseas, Rybus came to Maine after college to intern for a Portland photo agency—the only work offer she had received. “I fell for Maine, how its landscape could be both harsh and nourishing,” says Rybus, who still lives in Portland today.

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As a freelance photojournalist, she carries versions of the same cameras she used in college. “I want to think about equipment as little as possible,” she says. “I want to think about the experience.” And the breadth of her experiences is vast, from immersing herself in the world of wild sheep and the Mainers who care for them, to capturing the haunting moments of a home in Senegal being washed into the sea—an event, she says, that changed her life and spurred her desire to show climate change not as an abstract concept but as a burning reality.

To make her delicately beautiful landscapes and portraits, she strives to find intimacy and empathy with her subjects. “I’m asking people to be vulnerable” to what she calls “an interview with my camera,” she says. What she learns with her heart shows up in her eye, and we feel them both.

To see more of Greta Rybus’s work, including a preview of her new book, Hot Springs, go to gretarybus.com.

Three miles off the Maine coast is a trio of mostly barren islands—Little Nash, Big Nash, and Flat—inhabited only by wild sheep, the descendants of a flock first raised by a lighthouse keeper’s daughter on Little Nash in 1916. “The islands and the people who carefully and respectfully tend to the flock have become great inspirations to me,” says Rybus, who has made this place the focus of an ongoing multiyear project. “They’re by far the thing I love documenting most in this world.”
*Photo Credit : Greta Rybus*

In Senegal, a man looks through a door that just hours before had led to his family’s bedroom—the back of the house had washed away. The powerful image is part of Rybus’s “Climate Stories” project, during which she interviewed and photographed local people around the globe to discover how climate change affected their everyday lives.
*Photo Credit : Greta Rybus*

A skiff is essential transportation for artist Bo Bartlett, who spends summers with his wife and fellow artist Betsy Eby on Wheaton Island, a 20-acre outcropping of Maine’s famously remote Matinicus Isle. “In Maine,” Rybus says, “I can document a world that feels human-scale: enjoying food raised by neighbors, objects made by local artists, getting to important places by rowboat.”
*Photo Credit : Greta Rybus*

In this image from Rybus’s “Valley Eulogy,” a project that speaks to her own family’s history in the American West, cowboys prepare for a roping event at the annual rodeo in Ennis, Montana. “I’ve thought a lot about how Maine reminds me of Montana; both places have a deep connection to the natural landscape and feel protective of that connection. It’s behind my impulse to photograph fishing, farming, homesteading, and ranching.”
*Photo Credit : Greta Rybus*

One of Rybus’s favorite images from her new book, Hot Springs, is this portrait of a construction worker building a new road in Pamukkale, Turkey, to make the historical sites around a thermal complex more accessible. “It’s common while working on projects that I’m initially introduced to members of upper management to learn about a place, but the most meaningful connections will usually be found among the workers,” she says.
*Photo Credit : Greta Rybus*

Though she spends much of her time immersing herself in the lives of other people, Rybus often looks at her personal world through the camera, too. “Each year my partner and I carve out a little time to go somewhere beautiful in the summertime. We try to get off the grid, somewhere without Internet or electricity. One year we visited this tiny cabin on Maine’s Schoodic Peninsula, where we could hear the ocean while we slept.”
*Photo Credit : Greta Rybus*

Taken for an Atlas Obscura article titled “The Lost Art of Growing Blueberries with Fire,” this image remains “one of my favorite things I’ve ever photographed,” Rybus says. It shows Nicolas Lindholm, owner of Blue Hill Berry Co. in Penobscot, Maine, practicing the centuries-old indigenous tradition of burning wild blueberry barrens by hand to facilitate crop growth. While many of Lindholm’s fellow growers rely on mechanized burns, he sets out with a drip torch each spring to burn the hay that he spread across the barrens months before; helping to control the burn is a crew of family and friends armed with backpack water sprayers. For Lindholm, it’s one way to improve his odds in the chancy business of growing wild blueberries. “We’re dealing with a perennial crop in its native homeland,” he told Atlas Obscura. “There’s so many things that are out of your control. You gotta have a strong heart and be somewhat of a gambler.”
*Photo Credit : Greta Rybus*

During the two years Rybus spent capturing images for Hot Springs, she visited thermal waters that ranged from “simple, silty pools in the landscape“ to architectural marvels like the Gellért Spa in Budapest, shown here. “All the time, I was struck by the way nature provides for us and all the ways we use hot water for adventure, community, collectivity, spirituality, and connection.”
*Photo Credit : Greta Rybus*

While on assignment for Travel & Leisure, Rybus caught the light of serene happiness in the eyes of a girl who’d just been swimming in a cove on Deer Isle, Maine. Though Rybus was trained in photojournalism courses to document society’s problems and challenges—and often suffering and corruption—she says she’s most interested in finding images of “joy, reciprocity, community, and connection… there’s as much to be learned from joy as there is from pain.”
*Photo Credit : Greta Rybus*

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.

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