The work of photographer Jeff Dworsky illustrated a story published in Anglers Journal nearly six years ago titled On the Outskirts about the small fishing town of Stonington on Maine’s Deer Isle. Dworsky moved there from Massachusetts in 1973 when he was 17.
Now Dworsky’s work is the subject of a handsome, large-format book called Sealskin, from Charcoal Press. The book is 10 by 13 inches and 110 pages, with a hard cover embossed with a tipped-on photo. It highlights that which prompted our own feature of Dworsky’s photography: his visual documentation of a now bygone era in a tight-knit fishing community that preceded smartphones, Wi-Fi and artificial intelligence.
“The analog world,” Dworsky said.
Dworsky made friends quickly and gained the trust of many of Stonington’s roughly 900 townspeople, many of whom were fishermen. Dworsky himself has fished for much of his life.
A product of the early 1970s, Dworsky dropped out of school at 14, bought a Leica camera at 15 and headed to Maine the following year. It wasn’t until Dworsky had lived in Stonington for about 15 years that he loaded the camera with Kodachrome 64 slide film and began photographing the place he held dear. He proved to be a skilled amateur with an eye for composition.
Dworsky remembers flipping through National Geographic as a young man to study the photos for insights into fill flash, color, depth of field and other techniques. It was time well-spent for the young photographer. His own photographs are revealing in their honesty and documentary feel. He told Anglers Journal that his goal was to document a way of life that was disappearing with the real estate boom of the 1980s, which brought wealthy outsiders to the island.
Charcoal Press publisher Jesse Lenz recalled how he met Dworsky about 10 years ago at a small coffee shop on an island in Penobscot Bay, Maine. Lenz had his own Leica with him. “I used to shoot with a Leica,” Dworsky said, starting a conversation that became a friendship.
Lenz visited Dworsky several times a year, talking about cameras and photography, and looking through Dworsky’s archive of Kodachrome slides, which he kept in cardboard boxes. Their friendship became the book Sealskin, which Lenz set to a Celtic folktale.
“There was so much mystery and beauty in his photos, especially photos of his wife and young children,” Lenz said in a release on the book. “They were his muses. There was a striking sense of mystery in the way he depicted his wife — planting a garden, birthing a child, walking through foggy fields or naked at the edge of the ocean.”
In time, Lenz noticed fewer images of Dworsky’s wife, which he felt marked a shift in the photographer’s work. “When I asked him about it, his response was direct,” Lenz recalled. “My ex-wife left the island. We stayed.” Short and to the point, a typically taciturn Mainer.
As a publisher, Lenz said he is always looking for “threads” that connect mythology and folklore to the overarching themes in an artist’s work, even if the artist is not consciously aware of them. The publisher interweaved Dworsky’s photographs with a folktale about a marriage between a fisherman and a selkie, the mythological character who shapeshifts between seals and humans.
“Selkie folklore [is full of] romantic tragedies, ending with the selkie returning to the sea after several years as a wife to a human, leaving behind the husband and children,” Lenz said. The folktale not only embodied the emotional tone of Dworsky’s work but was “eerily similar” to his life. “His story reminds us that folklore and myths might be more real than we’d like to believe.”
I enjoyed Sealskin and the folktale it evoked. Where I saw only the old story of a vanishing way of life, Lenz sensed a tale as ancient as the tides.
Sealskin, priced at $60, can be ordered online from Charcoal Press.
