{"id":140554,"date":"2025-03-17T23:07:06","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T23:07:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/activist\/a-forlorn-portrait-of-a-maine-fishing-village-forced-to-modernise\/"},"modified":"2025-03-17T23:07:06","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T23:07:06","slug":"a-forlorn-portrait-of-a-maine-fishing-village-forced-to-modernise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=140554","title":{"rendered":"A forlorn portrait of a Maine fishing village forced to modernise"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Sealskin \u2014 Jeff Dworsky\u2019s debut monograph ties his own life on Deer Isle and elegiac family story with ancient Celtic folklore.<\/p>\n

Coming of age in the late 1960s, Jeff Dworsky fell in with the hippie scene in Cambridge’s Harvard Square while taking after school classes with legendary photographer Minor White. <\/p>\n

After his parents\u2019 marriage dissolved, Dworsky left home and crashed with some friends. An older friend saw the young teen falling through the cracks and stepped into the gap. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe invited me to come to his island in Maine for Columbus Day weekend, and we stayed on his sailboat,\u201d says Dworsky, who was immediately hooked. He moved to Stonington, a small town at the southern tip of Deer Isle, where he lobstered on old wooden fishing boats. <\/p>\n

Although the land, once home to the Abenaki for more than 6,000 years, was colonised shortly before the Revolutionary War, it was slow to modernise. \u201cWe didn’t have a telephone,\u201d Dworsky reveals. \u201cWe used a marine radio, or took a seven mile boat ride to get on the pay phone. It was very different.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the \u201870s progressed into the \u201880s, the voracious spirit of neoliberalism reached the outer banks, and with it came the end of the old ways. Witnessing the changes to his way of life, Dworsky picked up the camera and devoted himself to photographing the world in which he lived, a landscape that evoked a world of legend and lore.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was living on York Island with just my immediate family, and I was getting tired of lobstering, digging wells, and building barns and houses because it\u2019s heavy work,\u201d Dworsky says. \u201cIt\u2019s worthwhile, but it wasn\u2019t filling all the voids, so I started taking pictures again. I loved the part of Stonington that was connected to the 1900s and wanted to get what I could before it was gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Drawn to the haunting beauty of Dworsky\u2019s work, publisher Jesse Lenz crafted Sealskin<\/a> <\/em>(Charcoal Press), a hypnotic monograph centred around an old Celtic folktale of freedom, desire, possession, and loss.<\/p>\n

Lenz, who first met Dworsky a decade ago, was struck by a sense of mystery in the artist\u2019s photographs of his wife. \u201cSeeing her pictured at the edge of the water I couldn\u2019t help but think of the statue of K\u00f3pakonan, the legendary selkie on the island of Kalsoy [of Denmark],\u201d Lenz says.<\/p>\n

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\u201cOver time, her presence faded from the images, marking a clear shift in his work,\u201d Lenz continues. \u201cWhen I asked him about it, his response was direct, \u2018My ex-wife left the island. We stayed.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Selkie are mythological creatures said to live in the sea as seals, and take the form of young women on land. Both beautiful and helpful, selkies are highly coveted by humans who steal their seal skins, preventing them from returning to the sea, and tricking them into marriage and drudgery. \u201cTorn between the life she has and the life she had, selkie folklore are romantic tragedies, ending with the Selkie returning to the sea, leaving behind the husband and children,\u201d Lenz explains. \u201cThis folktale embodied not only the emotional tone of the work, but was eerily similar to Jeff’s own life.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Sealskin by Jeff Dworsky is published by Charcoal Press<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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