With a discerning eye, Hebert transforms the mundane into art

Medora Hebert found her calling with her head in the sky and a camera in her hand.

It was 1978 and she was on an airplane, shooting a rock n’ roll concert at the Cheshire Fairgrounds in Swanzey, N.H.

Hebert’s husband, Ernest, then a reporter at The Keene Sentinel, was in his last few weeks at the paper when he received an assignment to take aerial photos of a concert at the Cheshire Fair. He told his wife, who then had only a “trifling knowledge” of cameras, that she should do it instead. She happily obliged.

He showed her how to use the camera, a Rollei twin lens reflex box model, and off she went to the Keene Dillant-Hopkins Airport on her impromptu assignment.

The next day, one of her photos ran on The Sentinel’s front page.

“I just thought it was like the greatest adventure that ever happened,” the Westmoreland resident said. “I did something really fun, it turned out good, I liked it. Let’s do more.”

Hebert spun that first experience into a decades-long career, first in journalism and then in fine art. These days, she specializes in nature photography.

The walls of her studio at Ann Henderson Interiors on Main Street in Keene, N.H., are adorned with her work — photographs of brightly colored flowers, the glassy surfaces of wetlands and the sides of old railroad cars.

Recently, the small studio — one of several in the Central Square business — was strewn with frames, both empty and filled, leaned up against the walls and two brown leather armchairs.

Hebert’s photography is seemingly everywhere. It was part of the Keene ArtWalk in June, and she will hang more work at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon this month. She will also be featured in the River Valley Artisans Tour at Summit Winery in Westmoreland, N.H., in September, and plans to display some of her work at Cheshire Medical Center in Keene in the future.

Hebert’s signature touch is her use of unorthodox media with varying textures and hues as backgrounds that complement her dahlias and peonies. She’s also drawn to subjects that most people don’t even want to look at, let alone photograph, like rusty railroad cars and bogs.

“When I make something, I want to make something that doesn’t look like photography,” she said. “If I thought I could just sell straight-up pictures, I would.”

Into the arts

A New Hampshire native whose father worked for The Boston and Maine Railroad, Hebert was born in Rochester, N.H., and grew up in Dover, N.H. She attended the regional Catholic high school, where she said the lack of art education left her wanting more.

“When I look back, I just realized how much I really wanted art, but I couldn’t articulate it,” she said. “I never knew I wanted it so much, and I did right to my very core. It never crossed my mind that I could ask for it, demand it, make a scene.”

Hebert moved to the Monadnock Region in 1967 to study English at Keene State College. She met her husband during the first week of classes.

She minored in art, took studio art classes and worked at the Thorne-Sagendorph Art Gallery at Keene State, which houses several collections of modern and more traditional art. Hebert served as the assistant to the director, Jocelyn Brody.

She graduated in 1973, and, after her high-flying first foray into camera work in 1978, she took a gig as a photographer at the college’s information office and later at the athletic department.

Hebert did stints at the Valley News and The Keene Sentinel in the ‘80s and ‘90s and also worked at “Leisure Weekly,” a local arts magazine, during that time.

It was during her tenure at the Valley News that Hebert dipped her toe into nature photography. She began taking shots of windowsill plants.

In 1990, she captured what would be a popular piece, in which she photographed a clove of garlic with a watercolor painting in the background. Using a wide aperture and slow shutter speed, Hebert was able to focus on the garlic’s papery skin and give it a smooth, rounded look.

“It just flowed,” she said of the experience. “And it sold like crazy.”

Her professional work in the art world was bolstered when she worked for VOX Photography, a Portland, Maine, company that sourced photos for interior designers and other businesses.

Hebert loves the immediacy of photography. Unlike painting, where the image takes a while to create, a photo forms with the click of a shutter. She still remembers the rush of excitement she felt as she watched her first photo develop in a darkroom. She’s since transitioned to digital photography — her tools of choice are a Nikon 750, a Fuji XT-200 and her iPhone camera — which is even more immediate, she said.

“Photography is for painters in a rush,” Hebert quipped. She’s always wanted to be a painter — part of her still does — though she can never quite get the hang of it, she said.

Sometimes, that speed works to a photographer’s advantage. Hebert recounted one of her days at the Valley News, when her editor needed a standalone feature for the next day’s paper — a job photojournalists frequently do.

Hebert scampered out into the streets of Lebanon to find something worthy. In the late afternoon light, sometimes referred to by photographers as “golden hour” because of the color of the sunlight at that time, a hydrangea bush by a barn door caught her eye. Her editors were impressed. They used the photo on the front page, and she won a $35 award from the New England Newspaper and Press Association for her work.

Nature with a twist

For Hebert, good photography isn’t about the number of photos one takes or the quality of their equipment. It’s about seeing.

It’s that painter’s eye that defines her work. Hebert, who is especially interested in foreground and background, said she tries to do things in her pieces that separate them from typical nature photography — mostly out of necessity.

She’s frozen flowers before taking pictures, or arranged them on backgrounds with unusual textures and vivid colors. In a recent piece, she arranged a white peony against a baby blue patterned blouse she bought from Amazon. The realism of the flower juxtaposed against the pink floral print on the blouse catches the eye, and it’s difficult to determine if the image is drawn or captured.

Another of Hebert’s techniques involves taking pictures through a pane of glass to capture both the subject and its reflection. That way, the clouds or the high-up branches of a tree are thrown across the surface of water or on the petals of a flower.

Her artwork ranges from the sublime to the dilapidated, but Hebert said she finds beauty in the run-down, rotted and decayed, too. A self-described “railroad brat,” she is fascinated by rusty railroad cars, specifically the variations in color of their aged exteriors.

“A railroad car is instant design,” she said, pointing out how the perpendicular lines of rivets frame the word “Maine” stamped on the side of a car in one of her works. “It’s all defined. It’s all definition. It’s all done there.”

She’s also photographed world-famous authors like Stephen King, Annie Proulx and P.J. O’Rourke, as well as local literary heroes like Lael Wertenbaker and Steve Sherman.

Andrea Cheney, marketing coordinator for the Historical Society of Cheshire County, said she first met Hebert while they were both on the society’s board. Now, Hebert’s work is in the museum shop and on display in the “Our Stories” exhibit, which highlights local artists and their work with local subjects.

Cheney said folks in the Monadnock Region connect with Hebert’s pictures because she makes everyday natural features into art.

“It doesn’t look like a photo,” Cheney said of one of Hebert’s pieces. “It’s like you’re outside looking at a peony.”

A reception for Hebert’s show at DHMC’s Rubin Gallery in Lebanon will be held on Thursday, July 17, from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m. The gallery is in the Hematology Oncology hallway, Level 3.

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