Local photographer Ernest Morin, known for his pictures that capture everyday life on Cape Ann, will present his vision of Gloucester as seen through his camera lens tomorrow night in a presentation he has titled "Gloucester at the Crossroads."
Part of the city's first-ever Library Week to promote the Gloucester Lyceum and Sawyer Free Library, Morin's 36-minute presentation will begin at 7 p.m. in Kyrouz Auditorium at Gloucester City Hall to accommodate an anticipated large audience.
"Gloucester has a unique and real feeling to it," Morin said. "Through these photos, I wanted to make this uniqueness visible and then to document how the city is losing this character. "
Morin's slide show, all in black and white, is a variety of scenes and portraits captured in the past five years to express Morin's view of Gloucester.
The slide show will be followed by discussions led by Peter Anastas, a local writer, and Roger Brisson, director of Sawyer Free Library.
Morin's presentation captures Gloucester from several different perspectives. There are pictures of stores on Rogers Street and Washington Street that have gone out of business or been displaced; of elderly women sitting on a bench having a midday conversation; of contractors and stonemasons; of children sitting on porches and skating on railings; and of the waterfront in the wake of the dwindling fishing industry.
"One sees a bleakness in these pictures that is usually ignored in town," said Anastas, who has written several books on Gloucester. "But there is a local character in the photos that is very human and captivating."
Morin's Crossroads project began when he began to look around the city to understand the problems Gloucester was facing and what changes had affected the city, he said.
"I remember being downtown and seeing this girl scrawl with chalk on the sidewalk, 'I hate my life,'" Morin said. "I began to question what was going wrong for her and it grew into studying what was going wrong in the city as a whole."
Five years later, Morin cites the decline of the fishing industry, the city's main source of jobs for the working class, as the reason for the economic downturn in the city. Gloucester has gone from a robust fishing community that promised its upcoming generations the opportunity to make a living on the docks to a city that is no longer in need of a working class, Morin said.
Morin, 46, was born in Gloucester and grew up on Washington Street. His parents, Ernest and Phyllis, raised five children, and his father owned a commercial cleaning business. Morin's childhood was spent on the docks, doing odd jobs for hourly wages. He took to sailing in 1981 at the age of 21. Ten years later, Morin found himself sailing up and down the coasts of Europe and the Americas, restoring wooden ships.
It wasn't until 1995 that Morin began to seriously pursue photography as a career.
"Photography is a challenge for me. It's not something that comes naturally," Morin said. "But I love the inexhaustible medium that it provides me and how it allows me to process how I feel about the world."
The slide show and discussion at City Hall is an attempt to draw the city's residents together to not only reflect on the character of Gloucester, but to acknowledge the role that the Gloucester Lyceum and Sawyer Free Library have played in the city's history, according to Pat Earle, chairwoman of the library's Outreach Committee and founder of the Library First Star Reading Program.
"This is a fantastic presentation," Earle said of Morin's slide show. "When the idea first came forward to use this we realized it was a great way to reach out to the community."
