Mark Maio ’92: Going Against the Grain
As a photographer, Mark Maio ’92 had always been drawn to the imagery of industrial cities that dotted the northern parts of the U.S. And as a child who grew up in an ethnic neighborhood within such a city, he loved the stories that emerged from these urban enclaves.
So when he signed up for an Empire State University class called “Ethnic Neighborhoods in Northern Industrial Cities,” Maio was immediately captivated, especially when his professor asked him to use his camera to tell the story of what he saw.
“The visuals of these industrial cities really appealed to me,” says Maio, who lives in Alpharetta, GA with his wife. “And the stories appealed to me because they were my story.”
The 16-week course turned into a 16-year project that will be featured in an exhibit this fall at the Burchfield Penny Art Center in Buffalo NY, titled “Against the Grain.” The exhibit opens October 10, 2025, runs through April 26, 2026, and coincides with the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Erie Canal. A book by the same name will be published by Fall Line Press in October 2025.
Maio’s stark black-and-white images focus on “scoopers,” men of Irish descent who emptied the ships that transported grain to Buffalo, NY. The Buffalo ports were the gateway to the East Coast, where the Erie Canal intersected with the Great Lakes and the world’s first steam-powered grain elevator was constructed. The grains were eventually shipped to New York City and the rest of the world, where they were used to make bread, beer, and other staples.
“As I photographed the Old First Ward neighborhood, I learned about the Irish who lived there and unloaded the grain arriving from across the Great Lakes,” Maio says. “The grain was then either shipped on the Erie Canal or stored in the grain elevators built along the Buffalo River. These were the descendants of the same Irish who had dug the canal. And their stories were a lot like the ones my family lived.”
Helping Others
Maio grew up in an ethnic Italian neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His grandparents came to the U.S. from Sicily in 1910. One grandfather had been a coal miner, the other a garbage man. “We were lower income and blue collar,” he says. “While I grew up with friends from all different ethnic backgrounds, everything around my parents’ childhood was in Italian, the newspaper, the grocery store, and the banks. Visiting my grandparents every weekend left a lasting impression on where I came from, and I eventually wanted to tell my story through this project.”
Maio began doing photography in high school when he developed his first print and saw the magic in the process. He also found inspiration in “Life” magazine, where images by W. Eugene Smith and Margaret Bourke-White showed him the power of photography to tell stories.
“Growing up in the 60s, many of us had this change-the-world feeling, and I wanted to do something to help people with my photography,” Maio says.
After getting an associate degree in applied sciences in photography from the Milwaukee Area Technical College, Maio began doing ophthalmic photography, taking images of the interior and exterior of the eye to help doctors diagnose and treat diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, and corneal diseases. “I thought what better way for a photographer to help other people than to use photography to help them with their eyesight,” he says.
Although he didn’t have more advanced degrees, Maio joined the faculty at Emory University and was an adjunct at Rochester Institute of Technology. At the University at Buffalo, he was awarded the rank of clinical assistant professor in the medical school, even instituting a BS degree in ophthalmic photography that was discontinued when he left.
His own academic career, however, was at a standstill. “RIT had a BS in medical photography, but I couldn’t afford to quit my job to work on a degree,” he says.
He found the solution at SUNY Empire, where he was able to model his degree after the RIT program. Going to SUNY Empire, he says, changed the course of his life, as he began working on the project that became “Against the Grain.”
Maio graduated in 1992 with a B.S. in biomedical photography, becoming the first in his family to go to college. Later, he went to UB, where he got a master’s in the humanities and an MFA in photography.
Eyes on America
Unlike his peers who traveled to Europe and were interested in doing celebrity, fashion, or war photography, Maio wanted to capture the stories of America and devoted his time to documenting what he saw in the U.S. “I’ve been to all 50 states and traveled mostly on back roads,” he says. “I needed to know America, my America before learning about other countries.”
At the same time, Maio continued to thrive in the field of ophthalmic photography. In 1999, he developed the first high-resolution digital imaging system in ophthalmology. What had previously been captured on film could now be seen digitally, which sped up the diagnostic process.
Maio also became one of 12 people chosen to serve on Adobe’s Biomedical Imaging Advisory Group. The group worked with Adobe to develop Photoshop Extended, the first version of this software program to contain medical, technical and scientific digital imaging tools.
While ophthalmic photography may seem radically different from fine art photography, Maio says they are quite similar. “The creative process in both fields is actually the same,” he says. “It’s just the expression that’s different.”
With the opening of his exhibition at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Maio’s fine art photography is hitting a new high. Though he has exhibited in other galleries and museums and has photographs in the permanent collection of the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, this new show marks the first time the grain photographs will be in a major exhibition and accompanied by a book.
“Photography is not a hobby,” he says. “It’s my life, both in ophthalmic photography and the fine arts.”