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Gretchen Frank, a senior deckhand at Casco Bay Lines, is one of the Portland working people photographed for Tom Bloom’s Portland Works project. Photo by Tom Bloom Gretchen Frank has spent 30 years working on Portland’s waterfront, for Casco Bay Lines. So she’s met a lot of different kinds of people.
Still, she didn’t know what to make of photographer Tom Bloom, who came up to her one day and said he’d like to take her portrait. At first she resisted the idea, mostly because she didn’t know him, at all. Then she went online to see his website, where he had started a project called Portland Works , including photographs of working folks from all around the city.
Plus, she saw a few people among the portraits she knew. So she decided to pose for Bloom. “Once I saw what he was doing, I thought it was a great idea,” said Frank, 50, of Windham.
“It’s nice to have people who fly under the radar get recognition.” Medical assistant Joelle Nzeloka, posed holding her 1-month-old son, Kellyiam, and wearing clothes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Photo by Tom Bloom Bloom’s Portland Works exhibit is currently on view at the Portland International Jetport through February 2026.
It features 36 black and white portraits of a wide range of people and occupations, including construction workers, a mason, a firefighter, a teacher, a hospital worker, a plumber, a woodworker, a welder, a postal worker, a barber and a librarian. There are also people who are not necessarily paid by the hour, but who put a lot of skill and passion into their work and are vital to their communities, including a musician, a writer, an activist, a dancer, an actor and an artist. Bloom, who moved to Portland full time in 2019, said he got the idea to celebrate working people in photographs after years of working as a commercial photographer in New York.
He wanted to use his photos to capture the character of people who make up the life’s blood of any community, instead of just “the people in the towers downtown.” Bloom’s also an actor — he’s been on Broadway and in TV shows and films — and has taken a lot of headshots for fellow actors as part of his photography business over the years. So he was used to taking photos of people in the context of their job.
“When you’re shooting actors, you want to put them in some sort of context, find out what is the mindset behind these photos,” said Bloom, 79. “It’s the same for these. I tried to get them talking about something or someone they know, about what they do, and get the camera ready.
” Actor and photographer Tom Bloom took portraits of more than 36 working people for his Portland Works exhibit. Daryn Slover/Portland Press Herald WORK IS ALL AROUND Bloom had started thinking about the project when was in New York, where he lived for 40 years, in the vibrant Washington Heights neighborhood. He was inspired by a shoe repairman there, as well as other local businesses and workers.
He bought his Munjoy Hill house in 2013, and moved there full time in 2019 after his agent said he’d still be able to book acting gigs remotely from Maine. That’s when the idea for what became Portland Works really took off. Bloom started looking for people who caught his attention wherever he was.
He was taking a ferry out to one of the Casco Bay Islands one day when he spotted Frank driving a forklift on the dock, tall, serious and focused. He saw two construction workers repaving the street outside his house, and started chatting with them, making jokes. He eventually got them to come inside and pose in his studio.
Mason Dave Muldoon was doing some work at Bloom’s house when the photographer asked him to pause and pose. Photo by Tom Bloom He did the same with Dave Muldoon, a mason who was doing some stone work on Bloom’s property. Muldoon, who says he’s camera shy, had stone dust and dirt all over his shirt when he agreed to be photographed.
In the photo, the end of his belt is torn and tattered, and his expression is serious. “Tom has a lot of charm, so I guess I just decided to throw caution to the wind and let him take the photo. I figured who the heck is going to see it, ” said Muldoon, 60, of Portland.
The Portland Works show was displayed at two other venues before being hung at the jetport in March, and Muldoon says he’s been “taken aback” that so many people seemed to like his photo. The carpenter Bloom ended up photographing had been recommended to him as someone he might hire as an assistant, on this project. But when they met for the first time, and she was decked out in work clothes for her job as a carpenter, Bloom decided to include her in the photos.
Bloom found a barber to photograph mainly because he needed a haircut. After cutting his own hair for a while and deciding it looked awful, Bloom saw that there was a barber shop on Congress Street called Senior Citizens Barber Shop, offering discounts to seniors. So he went in and met with local legend Norman Millette, who has been cutting hair in Portland for more than 60 years.
Author Monica Wood knew Bloom because he had acted in her play, “Papermaker.” Photo by Tom Bloom Bloom has acted in plays at Portland Stage over the years, including “Papermaker” by Maine author and playwright Monica Wood . So Wood became the writer in his photo series.
Bloom’s acting and photography has gone hand in hand for most of his life. He grew up in Maryland, outside of Washington, D.C.
He started acting in college, at McDaniel College in Maryland, then was in the Navy for four years and met a photographer who got him interested in the craft. After the Navy, he went to Emerson College in Boston to study directing, and got involved in photography there, too. He realized there weren’t a lot of photographers doing actors’ head shots in Boston around that time, the early 1970s, so he started doing them.
Then when he began acting and directing, he realized photography was a steady way to make a living, to supplement the income from acting jobs. Bloom played multiple roles in several Broadway shows, including “Cyrano de Bergerac,” “The Rehearsal” and “Henry IV.” Some of his TV appearances include NBC’s “Law & Order” franchise and the soap operas “All My Children” and “Guiding Light.
” GET THEM TALKING Bloom said when photographing people for the Portland Works project, he tried to get them talking to feel comfortable. That might include getting them to talk about work, or their family or how they didn’t expect to be photographed minutes after tearing up pavement on the street or fixing a toilet. Sometimes he got them to smile, but then realized a serious expression made more sense.
That was the case with Frank, who smiled for some of the photos, but who admits she has a “pretty strict work presence” while on the job. “I think it’s a good representation of how I am at work,” said Frank, of her portrait in the show. “I feel like a have different persona at work.
” Fisherman Willis Spear’s smile came after talking about his wife. Photo by Tom Bloom Bloom got longtime Maine lobsterman Willis Spear to look relaxed and even laugh, by getting him to talk about his wife. The photo of Spear smiling, his hand gesturing, his hair a little messy, his shirtsleeve stained with dirt or grime, is one of Bloom’s favorites.
“You know what he was talking about? How much he loved his wife,” said Bloom. “You can get people talking about anything, their cat, it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s something or someone important to them.” In some cases, getting the subjects to feel comfortable involved giving them some creative control.
Medical assistant Joelle Nzeloka, posed holding her 1-month-old son, Kellyiam, and wearing clothes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She works as a medical assistant in a clinic at Maine Medical Center, but instead of wearing her work clothes she wanted to help represent and maybe motivate other immigrants or people facing challenges that seem daunting. “I was happy to wear that, to try to send a message to other people, who might feel hopeless,” said Nzeloak, 39, who recently went to see the exhibit at the airport.
“I’m so happy to see it on display, especially at the airport, with people coming here from all over. They can see that Maine is multicultural, with all kinds of people with all kinds of jobs.” A worker at the Portland International Jetport walks past Tom Bloom’s exhibit Portland Works at the airport in March.
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