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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