enlarge Courtesy of Portland Museum of Art

“The Dream,” 1869, 11½ by 9 inches, by Julia Margaret Cameron, from “Kindred Spirits.”

enlarge Courtesy of Portland Museum of Art

“Jessica Tandy,” 1997, 20 by 24 inches, by Joyce Tenneson, from “Kindred Spirits.”

enlarge Courtesy of Two Point Gallery

“Brooklyn Bridge” by Justin Van Soest at Two Point Gallery

enlarge Courtesy of Two Point Gallery

“Washington County” by Tonee Harbert at Two Point Gallery

IF YOU GO

KINDRED SPIRITS: JULIA MARGARET CAMERON & JOYCE TENNESON

WHERE: Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square, Portland, 775-6148

HOURS: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday, until 9 p.m. Friday

CLOSES: Cameron, Sept. 7; Tenneson, Oct. 4

KATE BECK: WHITESPOT DRAWINGS & BINDINGS

WHERE: ICON Contemporary Art, 19 Mason St., Brunswick, 725-8157

HOURS: 1 to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday, 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday

CLOSES: July 25

THE BAKERY PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTIVE

WHERE: Two Point Gallery, 564 Congress St., Portland, 699-4107

HOURS: 1 to 5 p.m. Monday to Wednesday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday, 1 to 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday

CLOSES: July 26

RUIN: PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRIAN VANDEN BRINK

WHERE: June Fitzpatrick Gallery, 112 High St., Portland, 772-1961

HOURS: Noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday

CLOSES: July 26

"Kindred Spirits," simultaneous exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Art, are enchanting and wistful. Their appeal lies in the soft melancholy of the work on view, of the demise of an elegant way of making images and, in a larger sense, of the ebbing of a way of thinking about photographs.

The confluence of these factors – tender voyages into the near-surreal, the near extinction of Polaroid photography and the waning of a majestic medium compounded from optics and chemistry – contributes solemnity to the event. Taken together they imply the ending of an era while it is still in its prime.

The decline of Polaroid is ironic. Lifted from a medium once akin in art to fast-foods in diet, it has become a process – however difficult – capable of producing large images of thrilling presence. Joyce Tenneson's photographs, one of the two exhibitions, gloriously confirm this. What high limits could also have been reached in Polaroid when used in a less grand format we will never know. Much the same applies to optical photography in general. As venerable as it is, its capacity for beauty, subtlety and emotional intensity has no evident limits. In substituting digital images for classical photographs, we are acting for reasons other than the exhaustion of their potential for enlarging vision.

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) has achieved cultural immortality. Overcoming gender bias and the limits assigned by the age to the mission or utility of photography, she became one of England's preeminent portrait photographers. Over the course of her career Cameron assembled selections of her portrait and allegorical work into elaborate albums and one, dedicated to her sister Maria ("Mia"), is the other component of "Kindred Spirits." Aside from the shrewdness of Cameron's selections – whose goal was to imply a cultured, well-connected and close family – the album is a fascinating artifact of the times. Disassembled for exhibition purposes, it is both a visual excursion through the intelligentsia of mid-Victorian England and a family embrace. The intensity of Cameron's sitters is a binding feature of her work and whether the person is a celebrity such as Alfred Tennyson or a family member selected to portray virtues such as holiness, domesticity or divine love, he or she has given themselves over to the photographer. She was entrusted to express them for the ages. And she did so with great intelligence and grace.

Joyce Tenneson's images are ravishingly beautiful and marked by a taste for the spectral. The most evanescent among them float quietly into surreality. That is a transition seldom accomplished in unmanipulated photography. The opposition between fidelity of detail and the physical presence of the huge Polaroids and the ethereal nature of the images is startling. There's nothing quite like it. The image has a bigness to it – scale and attitude – but the gossamer figures – filmy and gauze-draped – work in contradiction to it and the result is enchanting. It's an inspiring performance.

KATE BECK PENCIL DRAWINGS AT ICON

The pencil drawings of Kate Beck at ICON Contemporary Art are an exposition of austerity, technical refinement and exquisite sensibility. Slow to overcome the initial impression of linear elegance for the sake of elegance, Beck's work ultimately achieves moments so insistently animated that each succeeding viewing becomes an initiation. It is an ever renewing process and its accomplishment through the agency of parallel lines inscribed on white paper could be one of those sought-after moments in art, a moment of vision – here a moment which allowed the artist to reach beyond aesthetics to a consideration of movement in perpetual opposition to structure. Beck's lines and the spaces between them are never at rest. They resonate in perpetuity.

The discipline through which this is accomplished...