KENNEBUNK – The Speers Gallery at Kennebunk Free Library will present “Hands that Fashion Our World,” a photography exhibit by Kennebunk resident Nora Ordway that will run Sept. 1-30.

Ordway’s exhibit, according to a library press release, will feature 20 photographs of hands of people who work in Maine and “represent the work of hands, all sorts of hands, each pair captured in the hard labor of living, providing life and support for others.” They are, as a result, expressive, as memorable as the work to which they were applied.

Speers Gallery at Kennebunk Free Library will host “Hands that Fashion Our World,” a photography exhibit by Kennebunk resident Nora Ordway that will run Sept. 1-30. Courtesy photo

In this particular exhibition, wrote the library, “Ordway sought to catch hands at work, hands engaged in activities that would have been part of her grandmother’s life and experience. It is, therefore, as recorded in the photographs, a testament to the love between that woman and granddaughter with a camera … a marker of two lives well spent. The range of activity in the exhibit is broad: biscuit-maker, blacksmith, nurse, broom-maker, a couple of musicians (organ and banjo) among them. Ordway describes them as salt-of-the-earth professions by salt-of-the-earth individuals.

“The broom-maker, in particular, she recalls as a young man from New Jersey who somehow found his way to Wiscasset, Maine, and began quite inexplicably turning straw into a common household tool: good, solid industry, her grandmother might have said. Remarkable, though, the slender hands, the long fingers … they’re captured in this photo as if poised for the next note on a cello. You can almost hear the song playing in his heart. It is that moment when the broom-making stops, and the imagination begins to hear the music … magnificent.”

Ordway’s photos, in the broadest sense, might be described as a history of moments.

The public is invited to view the exhibit in the library’s Speers Gallery from Sept. 1-30 at 112 Main St., Kennebunk, during regular library hours when the gallery is not in use for library programs. For current library hours and gallery access, visit www.kennebunklibrary.org.