Fisherman’s Mysterious Pictures Seize Essence of Selkie Folklore

Jeff Dworsky dropped out of college at 14, purchased a Leica at 15, and moved to a small island in Maine at 16 to turn out to be a fisherman.

“Dworsky embodies my ideal of an artist: someone obsessed with living their life and making pictures as the byproduct,” writes photographer Jesse Lenz.

Ten years in the past, Lenz had an opportunity encounter with Dworsky inside a small espresso store on a distant Maine island in Penobscot Bay.

“He turned, saw my Leica and said, ‘I used to shoot with a Leica’, and that was the beginning of our friendship,” Lenz explains.

It seems Dworsky had been artfully capturing his life on the island utilizing his Leica and Kodachrome movie because the Nineteen Seventies. Lenz started trawling Dwosky’s archive and located each thriller and sweetness in his photographs, which deal with his muses: his spouse and younger kids.

“There was a striking sense of mystery in the way he depicted his wife—planting a garden, birthing a child, walking through foggy fields, or naked at the edge of the ocean,” Lenz says.

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

Selkies are mythological creatures that may shapeshift between seal and human types by arriving on land and eradicating their sealskin. Once in human type, there are lots of tales of selkies changing into romantically concerned with people, typically leading to kids. However, selkies are then torn between the life they as soon as had at sea and their new life — typically searching for an escape.

“These folktales embodied not only the emotional tone of the work I had felt from the first time I saw it, but was eerily similar to Jeff’s own life,” provides Lenz. “His story reminds us that folklore and myths might be more real than we’d like to believe.”

This second printing of Dworsky’s fashionable debut photobook Sealskin brings again into print his chronicle of household life and the fishing group of a small Maine village through the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties.

Using Kodachrome movie, Dworsky documented each day life, work on the water, and intimate moments at residence, capturing a close-knit coastal world that now not exists.

Sealskin by Jeff Dworsky is published by Charcoal.