Artist Talk and Book Signing: Nick Gervin - PORTLANDERS
“The deeper I dug,
the more the city shared its secrets with me.”
In his debut monograph, Nick Gervin presents a surreal look into the flip-side of American culture, all captured candidly in Maine's largest city, Portland. Population: 68,000.
In December 2008, Gervin suffered a traumatic head injury after being assaulted, an event that would dramatically alter the course of his life. Barely able to afford rent after having recently been laid off from work in the fallout of the recession, he swiftly spiraled into poverty and addiction – a situation exacerbated by his injury, the second head trauma he’d experienced in his lifetime. Diagnosed with Post-Concussion Syndrome, Gervin developed severe sensitivity to light and sound and experienced debilitating migraines which left him feeling like a “prisoner in [his] own body”. At first, favoring the dark, quiet nights over the chaos of daytime, it was during these periods of solitude and broken sleep that Gervin rediscovered photography, roaming the streets after dark with his camera and finding a renewed sense of purpose in the process.
What followed was a ten year pursuit of photographing the many layers of his home city which saw him capturing everything from protest marches, wrestling bouts to drunken night-time brawls and even venturing down into the long forgotten subterranean networks of tunnels beneath the streets. As Gervin explains,
“I was driven by my anxieties,
trying to stay sober while I attempted to make sense of my life and the transitioning world around me. I was making a visual record of a place in time. A portrait of a city that I’ve grown a deep attachment to. I believe, to truly love the city where you live, is to embrace it for all its faults and beauty. As time went on and I felt compelled to continue the work, I realized it was not just myself, but also the city and it’s Portlanders that were also at a crossroads.”
