A forlorn portrait of a Maine fishing village forced to modernise

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. 

After his par­ents’ 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. 

“He invit­ed me to come to his island in Maine for Colum­bus Day week­end, and we stayed on his sail­boat,” 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. 

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. ​“We did­n’t have a tele­phone,” Dworsky reveals. ​“We used a marine radio, or took a sev­en mile boat ride to get on the pay phone. It was very different.”

As the ​‘70s pro­gressed into the ​‘80s, 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.

“I 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’s heavy work,” Dworsky says. ​“It’s worth­while, but it wasn’t 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.”

Drawn to the haunt­ing beau­ty of Dworsky’s work, pub­lish­er Jesse Lenz craft­ed Seal­skin (Char­coal Press), a hyp­not­ic mono­graph cen­tred around an old Celtic folk­tale of free­dom, desire, pos­ses­sion, and loss.

Lenz, who first met Dworsky a decade ago, was struck by a sense of mys­tery in the artist’s pho­tographs of his wife. ​“See­ing her pic­tured at the edge of the water I couldn’t help but think of the stat­ue of Kópako­nan, the leg­endary selkie on the island of Kalsoy [of Den­mark],” Lenz says.

“Over time, her pres­ence fad­ed from the images, mark­ing a clear shift in his work,” Lenz con­tin­ues. ​“When I asked him about it, his response was direct, ​‘My ex-wife left the island. We stayed.’”

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. ​“Torn 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,” Lenz explains. ​“This folk­tale embod­ied not only the emo­tion­al tone of the work, but was eeri­ly sim­i­lar to Jef­f’s own life.”

Seal­skin by Jeff Dworsky is pub­lished by Char­coal Press.

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