Dr. Robert Naylor, vice president and dean of the College, likes to imagine that if not for his selling a Canon F-1 in 1977 to then-student Tillman Crane ’78, Tillman would be working in something other than photography today.

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“I had two Canon F-1s, and I needed to sell one,” explained Naylor who was, at that time, trying to live on an assistant professor’s salary. “Tillman was around taking photographs and said he could use it.

“I like to think that that camera gave him his start,” the dean said, tongue in cheek.

In truth, “accidental photographer” is the best explanation Tillman can give for how he got where he is today. At Maryville, he double-majored in history and religion.

“I was hoping to study at Harvard and work on a master’s and doctorate in the first four centuries of Christianity,” Tillman explained recently. “However, I didn’t get in to Harvard on the first application. While working on a master’s in philosophy, I took a job as a photojournalist with the Maryville-Alcoa Daily Times. I had studied photography during college but it was a pastime, not a passion.

“During the first year as a photojournalist, my love for image-making and storytelling grew,” he added. “When it was time to reapply for graduate school as was suggested, I passed and chose photography instead.”

Attending workshops during vacations and extended leaves, Tillman broadened his knowledge of photography at places like the Maine Photographic Workshops and the Missouri School of Journalism, but covering tragedies like automobile accidents and house fires eventually drove him from the newspaper business. He enrolled at the University of Delaware for graduate work in photography and landed a job teaching at the Maine Photographic Workshops. His graduate thesis, “Cathedrals of the Industrial Revolution,” visually captured the architecture of train stations along the east coast from Washington, D.C., to Boston.

Tillman and his family left Maine in 1996, when he was hired to develop a photography program at Waterford Fine Arts Academy and direct its Summer Mammoth Camera Workshop in Sandy, Utah. After five successful years, he decided to pursue full-time work, moving back to Maine. He has been commissioned by the Center for Documentary Arts and the Portland Museum of Art and has been invited to speak to the Scottish Royal Photographic Society and teach at the Inversnaid Photography Center on Loch Lomond. Images taken in Scotland since 2002 comprise his most recent book, Touchstones.

Working in an age where cameras are made tiny and tinier, Tillman has gone the opposite route, choosing to haul large-format cameras to shoots. His images, printed in silver and platinum/palladium, have been exhibited in galleries across the country.

“I understand the world through photography,” Tillman once wrote. “I photograph what I feel through what I see. The breath of stillness in a redundant church, the mystery of the standing stones, the strength of a stone wall, the chaos of clothes left behind at a healing well resonate within me.

My pilgrimage is both an internal and external voyage of discovery.”

Structure for students

Images from the book Tillman Crane/Structure are on permanent exhibit at the College.  Framed and installed with a gift from MC board member Nancy Cain (Tillman’s friend from the Daily Times), 25 prints adorn the walls and corridors of the Bartlett Hall Student Center.