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By 1965, John McKee, an Illinois-born scholar who was hired to teach French literature at �պ����ֲ�, had fallen in love with photography and with Maine's beauty. Encouraged by Marvin Sadik, the  at the time, McKee spent the summer driving along the state's ragged coast to take photographs.

The black-and-white images he ended up printing were not what people expected of nature photography. Instead of resembling the grand vistas of Ansel Adams or Edward Weston, McKee revealed raw sewage flowing into the ocean, rusting hulks of cars lining beaches, a rash of “no trespassing” and ”keep out” signs, and commercial billboards blighting landscapes.

Exhibited in the 1966 show As Maine Goes at the �պ����ֲ� College Museum of Art and published in a  his pictures jolted viewers and lent visceral imagery to a swelling environmental movement. (As Maine Goes is a play on the famous phrase, “as Maine goes, so goes the nation.”) 

Inspired by the exhibition, �պ����ֲ� hosted a symposium in 1966 with land use planners, conservationists, and policymakers. Echoes of their conversations reverberated as far as Augusta and Washington, DC, helping to usher in federal legislation like the Clean Water Act and Maine's law against billboards. 

This semester, to commemorate and reflect on As Maine Goes, Goodyear and Zhang are taking their own road trips to retrace McKee’s footsteps. Using a large-format camera, the same type McKee used, they’re pinpointing the spots where McKee once stood, to document all that has changed—or stayed the same—in his field of view.

“John focused on this incredibly beautiful place that had been spoiled,” Goodyear said. “His pictures were meant to provoke a conversation about Maine as a pure and natural place.”

As Zhang and Goodyear have driven coastal roadways and explored beaches, seaside villages, and summer resorts, Zhang has had the luxury of looking more closely at his home for the past four years. 

“Working on this exhibition, researching the environmental history of Maine, and revisiting the places McKee photographed have deepened my appreciation for the landscape I had taken for granted,” Zhang said. “It’s hard to imagine the idyllic Popham Beach we know today was littered with trash just sixty years ago.”

June Show at the Museum of Art

Their photography project coincides with an exhibition of McKee’s work at the �պ����ֲ� College Museum of Art opening June 28.

A bequest from John McKee, who died in 2023, and the sixtieth anniversary of As Maine Goes made it a fitting time for a retrospective. Goodyear and Zhang are collaborating on “John McKee: As Maine Goes” to share McKee's As Maine Goes photos as well as twenty-one images from McKee's later projects that are new to the museum.

How is Maine Going Today?

On a recent trip to Phippsburg, Goodyear and Zhang visited Fort Popham, a crumbling nineteenth-century military installation, its blocky stones splotched with bright orange lichen. It stands at the mouth of the Kennebec River as it courses into the sea.

As he pulled up to the parking lot, Goodyear suddenly pointed at a stately white house perched on a hill across the river. “This is our shot! See that white house right there?” he said. Zhang sat up straight, “I see, yes! I see!” 

The house, looking remarkably unchanged from when McKee captured it in his photograph of the site, was a helpful landmark to Zhang as he positioned his camera.

In many other ways, this spot is very different sixty years after McKee once took it in. Only one clear plastic bottle—filled with an off-putting, burgundy-colored liquid—defiled the scene, compared to McKee's photo showing a littered stretch of beach braced with a wall of twisted, tangled metal, the remains of abandoned cars.

So far this semester, Goodyear and Zhang have traveled to Old Orchard Beach, Biddeford, Scarborough, Phippsburg, and Boothbay. What they’ve seen has been encouraging. “There have been dramatic changes,” Goodyear said. “Mostly for the good.”

But Zhang noted that while his photos show a tidier, less polluted version of Maine, he is still capturing threats to the environment. His images reveal erosion from more intense storms and new concrete walls erected to keep expensive homes from falling into the ocean. A few of his shots are blocked by new development or signs for franchises.

“My work is a meditation on what is happening now,” Zhang said.

“Re-re-photography”

Though Zhang’s photographs won’t be included in the upcoming �պ����ֲ� Museum of Art exhibition, he and Goodyear aim to publish them alongside McKee’s 1965 prints in a new book.

Their volume will also include several photos by Ben Smith ’93. Smith was so inspired by McKee that he put aside his original intention to become an engineer to major in environmental studies and art. For his honors project, Smith hit the road in 1993, just as McKee had done, to recreate his professor's photographs and to study “the intersection between the natural and human landscape,” he said, “how humans have changed the face of the planet.”

Zhang happened upon Smith's series while doing research in �պ����ֲ�'s , which holds Smith’s work. Goodyear recalls Zhang bounding into his office after the discovery, eager to tell him of the trove of photos that linked McKee’s work to his own.

“After stumbling upon Ben Smith’s 're-photographs' [the term Smith uses for photography that recreates older site-specific images to document change], the project began to feel like a cross-generational conversation about the environment: John McKee in 1965, Ben Smith in 1993, and me in 2025,” Zhang said. The three sets of images created over the decades provide an uncommon visual timeline of Maine. 

In his exhibition essay, Smith wrote, “The billboards are gone now. ...Beaches have been cleared of old cars and junk and dunes have been protected,...but McDonald's and Pizza Huts line the sides o f US Route 1 from Saco to Ellsworth, while waterslides and arcades provide entertainment for the Old Orchard Beach crowds. The character of the Maine coast looks quite different through the lens of my camera than it did through McKee's in 1965.”

Zhang noted that he also received the McKee Photography Grant in 2024, a fund established by McKee's devoted students after he retired in 2002.

“Since I’ve also been indirectly shaped by John McKee as a recipient of the McKee grant, this project feels like both an act of gratitude for the attentiveness and generosity he and his students embodied and a continuation of their legacy into the twenty-first century,” Zhang said.

“This whole endeavor feels like a marvelous full-circle moment, connecting me to generations of people before me who fought tirelessly to protect the Maine coast while allowing me to contribute to that legacy in my own voice.”