Dixon's 'Dreamscapes' Explores Childhood Landscape, Memories

BRIDGEWATER - There's something about Bridgewater photographer Mary Dixon's dreamy hand-coloured images of children effortlessly enjoying the sand and sun at some of Lunenburg County's most popular vacation haunts that can stir even the least sentimental among us.

Blame it on the nostalgic effects of sepia toning or the distortion of infrared film but it's hard to look at her images of young girls examining marsh grass as they lie on their bellies along the Rissers Beach boardwalk or a boy flying his kite at the shore and not become sidelined on your own stroll down memory lane.

For Ms Dixon, the photographs, appearing this month at the Liverpool-based Sherman Hines Gallery, are an exploration of memories from her own youth along the South Shore. Arriving here as a 10 year old, the Montreal native recalls finding locations such as Rissers Beach or Green Bay mildly exotic.

But with her older brothers off to either summer jobs or university, it was also a time of solitude for the young girl; a theme that also comes through in the photographs, most often shot low and wide using infrared film.

Ms Dixon says she chose infrared because of the inherent distortion and graininess which tends to make the images a little more dream-like. It also helps to exaggerate elements like sky and water while leaving figures somewhat more anonymous. Not that they are left this way. For it is the figures in her photographs that get most of the focus through the hand-colouring process.

"Although the places are important to me, it's the experience of the person in the place which is more important," she explains during an interview over a corner of her colouring table.

However, there are exceptions, notably several shots taken on the midway of the South Shore Exhibition where a whirl of colour has been used to convey the noise and motion of the scene, or a small selection of adult nude studies where the tones of surrounding water are played up against almost wraith-like figures.

The subjects in most of the photographs are children whom Ms Dixon knew and accompanied on these excursions. Others she simply met on site. However, she says she never directed their movements.

"If something arose that appealed to me compositionally, I would have the relationship to say 'could you hold that?' But the scenarios were not made up," she says.

She chose to sepia-tone the prints for the nostalgic effect.

"It gives (the images) that old-fashioned feel even though they're all modern subjects," she says.

The nudes, which she tends to class as something separate from the main part of the exhibition, are not done with sepia.

"I didn't think it was appropriate," she says.

They also tend to be more focused than her other shots.

For Ms Dixon, the appeal of hand-colouring is its ability to blur the lines between the realism most often associated with photographic work and surrealistic elements available through mediums like painting.

"It's a way of taking (an image) further, making it less realistic if I want to or adding a quality that isn't strictly representational," she says. "Plus, I like working with prints."

In fact, the photographer admits there was a time in her life when she briefly considered art school but abandoned the idea for lack of a high school art program, and the much-needed portfolio materials she would have been able to produce there, as well as the sense it just wouldn't make a practical career. It wasn't until the early 1990s then, after abandoning a busy career in law, that Ms Dixon began to re-examine what to that point had always been a hobby in photography. She recalls the 1991 Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival where, while taking some promotional shots for the festival committee, she got to know a photographer with the magazine, Canadian Living.

"That was sort of my first notion that you could do this as a career," she says.

The photographer also introduced Ms Dixon to Eric Hayes, a long-time newspaper and magazine photographer, who at that time operated the Bridgewater Camera Corner. The two struck up a friendship, which later developed into a personal relationship. They married last month.

Working with Mr. Hayes, as well as a host of top photographers through various workshops, Ms Dixon has developed her own photographic style, quite unique from that of her husband. In fact, during a recent interview concerning the new Halifax-based View Point Gallery, of which both he and Ms Dixon are members, Mr. Hayes joked that he probably did not qualify as an artist in the way his wife and other gallery members do and so had to agree to be the group's treasurer.

As for her current exhibition, Ms Dixon says it came about after she left two postcards from her home-based show Somewhere Between Dream and Memory, held during the 1999 South Shore Festival of the Arts, at the Hines gallery last fall. Officials there later called requesting more of her work and ultimately offered her a show.

Dreamscapes, as she has aptly called it, opens today and runs through October 24.