personalities 42 p o r t l a n d monthly magazine courtesy photo Skill Set 4 W hile artists of his ilk are leav- ing the state for New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, even Austin— Ben Severance, 30, has chosen a long-term relationship with the Forest City, where he lives in a shared apartment on Howard Street on Munjoy Hill. It overlooks a tan- gled garden and firepit where you’re sure to find a crew of Portland’s gaffers, producers, photographers, writers, and cinematogra- phers talking shop on a warm night. Being handed his father’s vintage Pentax camera presented an outlet for Severance growing up in Wilmot Flat, New Hamp- shire. It would lead to travel and work for organizations including the United Na- tions, Swarovski, and Habitat for Human- ity. “I didn’t want to be in New York. I don’t like it,” he says over a beer at Brian Boru, the watering hole across from his office on Center Street. “And I’m from small-town New England. You don’t really look at Bos- ton and dream of it. Portland feels, in some ways, like a West Coast city. We’re close to the mountains, the coast. People here value the things I value.” Severance pursued photo- journalism at Western Ken- tucky, where he met some of those whose famous photos hung on the walls of his childhood bedroom, including Sam Abell and David Alan Harvey. But it wasn’t all quite what he’d imag- ined. Focused on what he calls “cause-based photography,” he admits he became a bit disillu- sioned at one point. “They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes. Some were egomaniacs. And pre- senters would come to the school and say, ‘I don’t know why you all are in this.’” None of which kept Severance from getting noticed. “There was some validation years later, after I’d sort of given up photo. Friends pushed me to submit to Eddie Adams Photo Work- shop,” a creative mecca that accepts around 100 participants. “At the end, Santiago Ly- on, my mentor throughout and head of the Associated Press, said I could go any- where in the world, some foreign city, and just start working. That made me feel like I could put photo to rest because at that point, I was already hooked on video.” He launched Timber and Frame in 2012 and started working with a non- profit in Ohio before he snagged his first commercial gig for Country Crock. “That was an existential crisis–whether I was going to do that or not. But, we ended up doing it. That launched us into a world of New York ad agencies.” Now in Portland, Severance leads a team of Maine freelancers—“as good as any out of New York or the West Coast. There’s a stigma that good creative in our field–video and commercial produc- tion–has to come out of New York, L.A. That’s absolute bullshit. With the inter- net, you can have amazing creative com- ing out of anywhere in America. I chal- lenge anyone on that fact. I face [that mis- conception] when I interact with clients in L.A. and New York. ‘Why are you in Port- land, Maine?’ Well, young people like my- self don’t want to live in New York. I have so many friends in New York looking out windows dreaming of living here.” Big-city mindsets aren’t the only chal- lenges Severance is taking on. “When working with local organizations, we’re working really hard to bring diversity in all forms to our work when maybe clients aren’t calling for it or aren’t even aware that it’s something they should be considering. We’ll tell them that’s a problem. I’ve had clients say, ‘That represents the demograph- ic of Maine,’ but I don’t think that’s an [ac- ceptable] excuse, and it’s definitely not an excuse for traditional gender stereotypes. We want to show it’s not just white people here. When we filmed for the United Na- tions in Portland, people who’d come from all over—Somalia, Sudan, Iraq—they’d grown up in these communities such as East Bayside and have said things like ‘I’m a Mainer. Portland is diverse.’ Their experience is so different from what the outward appear- ance of Maine is.” Those shallow conclusions from the outside is the fuel Sev- erance is burning on. “We have a place of power. I can influ- ence the actors, talent, scenari- os that go into the commercials that people watch on TV that represent Maine. I can push for that imagery to undermine a lot of stereotypes. And we want to work with organizations that value the fact that when we’re filming and need some- one working with a chainsaw, it should be a young woman. ‘Oh, we need someone on a moun- By Olivia Gunn Kotsishevskaya Ben Severance has real Maine stories to tell.