ON THE OUTSKIRTS
A COLLECTION OF PHOTOS FROM DECADES AGO CAPTURES A SMALL MAINE FISHING VILLAGE STARING AT CHANGE
Photographer Jeff Dworsky’s images of Stonington, Maine, taken nearly 30 years ago, reveal a world where families fished hard, shared what they had and made a hardscrabble living on the water.
By WILLIAM SISSON and KRISTA KARLSON
These images depict life in the small fishing village of Stonington, Maine, during a four-year period starting in 1989. You don’t have to look hard to see the bone-weary tiredness of long days on the water. A fisherman holding his head in his hands. Another looking off vacantly, nearly asleep on his feet. Men in flannel, slouching, leaning on a pile of nets, a cigarette stuck to the lower lip of one, pinched between the thumb and index finger of another. The photos were taken by Jeff Dworsky, who moved to Stonington when he was 17 and worked for 40 years as a fisherman. Revealing in their honesty and documentary feel, Dworsky’s images capture a bygone era, a way of life in a tight-knit community on the cusp of change. A world before smartphones, Wi-fi and artificial intelligence. You fished on your wits, skills and experience, with a thin safety net or none at all.
“The analog world,” Dworsky says. These Maine fishermen shared the common language of tools and handwork that bridged generations and geography. They fixed or cobbled together boats and gear that were broken, failing or just worn out. They read the water, worked the tides and developed a weather eye. Some could even smell fish. They mastered the mechanical world and the vagaries of the coastal waters as adroitly as millennials navigate the digital sphere with an iphone.
They looked at the world pragmatically. Fog? “I remember my father telling me it’s the same way out as it is back in,” a Maine lobsterman told me.
The lobster boats pictured here are small, narrow and tender by today’s standards. They were valued for their function above all else; their owners didn’t have the luxury of growing overly sentimental about them. They fished their boats hard, right to the nub.
Look closely, and you’ll see artifacts from the old world: a black rotary phone, clothes drying on a line, wooden lobster traps, a steadying sail, wristwatches, a pencil sharpener, a roll-top desk. Those shots that transcend time reveal lives tied to the sea, and a sense of place and community embodied by dozens of small fishing towns from Maine to Alaska.