Gary Briechle

“Winter is always too long. Put the plow on the truck, stay warm, take your meds. Get through it any way you can. Spring is mud. Summer, the stunning but brief reward. Then the fall into winter again.”
New Jersey born photographer Gary Briechle (born 1955) has forged many long-term relationships with the people he has photographed since moving to Maine nearly 20 years ago. This gives his work a peculiar intimacy, as if the pictures were made by a family member. He lives and works in midcoast Maine and doesn’t see a need to travel to make photographs: “Most everything that inspires me is within a few miles of my home. Sometimes I think that Maine is like my foster family; I’m not really entirely comfortable and will probably never feel completely settled, but Maine keeps feeding me.”

"The last time I photographed Arizona (an eight-year-old girl that I've been photographing since she was one) I did what I always do: I taped a black Walmart sheet to the house, set the camera up on the tripod and got her to lean back with shoulders touching to steady herself. A minute later, as I poured fixer over the glass, an image appeared out of a swirl of watery blue-green. Even though I had done this countless times before, what I saw was an image I never saw before." —Gary Briechle
On the rocky coast of Maine, New Jersey-born photographer Gary Briechle (born 1955) found himself driven to make pictures, using the wet-plate collodion process, of the individuals who constitute his stand-in family.