Maine photographer and fisherman Jeff Dworsky admits that he can be downright ornery.
“I’m a big, burly, loud, tough guy,” Dworsky said. “I’m a Stonington fisherman, for [expletive’s] sake.”
However, it’s those same traits that have allowed him to live an amazing life.
They helped him move to Maine, on his own, while still a teenager in the 1970s. Dworsky then learned to lobster, got married, raised a family and eked out a living on a tiny speck of land in Penobscot Bay before finally releasing his first book of photographs at age 69.
Published late last year, “Sealskin” juxtaposes Dworsky’s hardscrabble documentary pictures made on the Maine coast in the 1970s and 1980s with seemingly unrelated text about an old Celtic folktale, penned by Jesse Lenz, a Midwest photographer and the book’s publisher.
The solemn color photos were all made with an analog 35mm camera paired with golden-saturated Kodak Kodachrome slide film. They resemble classic-era National Geographic magazine images, depicting both a vanishing way of Maine coastal life and Dworsky’s own growing back-to-the-land family.
On the pages of the slim volume, two old fishermen set up a weir, standing in a wooden, flat-bottomed skiff. A man sets fire to a blueberry barren. Two people weave nets for old-fashioned wooden lobster traps. A child wearing a battered orange life preserver helps pilot a small outboard boat as Stonington recedes in the distance.
More personal pictures are also included. One shows Dworsky’s wife giving birth to one of their three children in their house on York Island — just off Isle Au Haut — where they lived without electricity. Another shows the same baby getting bathed in the sink by candlelight. Several others depict Dworsky’s wife nude in idyllic settings, or the couple’s children roaming their island paradise, enjoying what appears to be unfettered freedom.
Dworsky, the son of a Harvard College professor, first set foot in Maine at age 16, in 1971. The next year, in the midst of his parents divorce, he left home for good and moved in with a boat-building friend in Round Pond. He never left Maine again.
“I had no place better to go, that’s for sure. I loved it here,” Dworsky said. “We had a garbage bag half full of pot and I had 550 record albums and a nice stereo — we made quick friends with the neighborhood kids.”
By the end of the decade, Dworsky was married, living on York Island and lobstering. Breaking into that entrenched, territorial business wasn’t easy. At the beginning, other fishermen often cut his trap lines.
“I was the first person from out of state to ever fish here. I lost half my traps the first year,” Dworsky said. “Yeah, I had some issues in the beginning, and that’s OK. I put some hard weather in, and people eventually responded to that.”
It was around that time, when he’d come into Stonington to run errands, that Dworsky began to notice the place changing. It was the early 1980s real estate boom, when outsiders were “discovering” Maine. Lots of non-fishing, summertime-only newcomers were moving into town. Old ways of living and fishing were dying.
Dworsky had been making pictures, for himself, since childhood, but decided it was time to document the fast-vanishing old coastal way of life he saw around him before it was too late.
“I really wanted to record what was left of the Stonington that I had moved here on purpose to be a part of,” Dworsky said. “Through that period, my photography developed and was borne out of a sense of loss and nostalgia.”
Dworsky had no grand plan for publishing his photos. He’d done a little bit of shooting on the side for magazines and hated every part of it, especially meeting art directors’ expectations.
“I just wanted to shoot my own stuff, for me,” he said.
Dworsky continued seriously making photos for the next few years, until the early 1990s, when the Stonington he was trying to capture was finally gone.
One of the most remarkable photos he captured in those years is a multilayered image of a man and a woman standing at a makeshift table during some kind of party in an unfancy location. In front of them are classic Maine cocktail ingredients: coffee brandy, a gallon of milk, Canadian whiskey and ginger ale.
The man is smiling and reaching for a bottle. The woman looks off to the side, deflating balloons behind her. In the background, two young boys drink from plastic cups. One looks unsure. The other seems totally satisfied.
“They were just learning to drink beer,” Dworsky said, of the boys. “One of them is now dead and the other is a grandfather.”
In the past few years, with his own kids grown and himself nearly retired from lobstering, Dworsky is finally beginning to show his important work. Not long ago, he donated some 1,500 slides to the Penobscot Marine Museum’s massive photo archive in Searsport.
And now he’s published his first book. Cantankerous to the end, however, Dworsky said he’s not really happy with it. He didn’t like compromising with the publisher about which pictures to include or leave out. He’s looking forward to publishing another couple books, mostly on his own. At least one of them will include more pictures of Stonington and surrounding communities in the old days.
“This one’s really Jesse’s book,” Dworsky said, of his publisher. “He can do whatever he wants, and that’s fine. But I’m going to go do my own [expletive] books — then, maybe, I’ll feel like I did all of this for a reason.”
