Working the Sea
Photographs from the Penobscot Marine Museum
9781952143519
168 pages
Islandport Press
Overview
In 2012, The National Fisherman, a leading Maine-based trade magazine for commercial fishing, donated its entire pre-digital photographic archives to the Penobscot Marine Museum. Around the same time, The Atlantic Fisherman, a predecessor to The National Fisherman, also donated roughly one thousand images. The combined collections include thousands of photographs that provide a remarkable and comprehensive look at the American fishing industry from the 1920s to 1990s. The photographs of boats and the people who worked them are historically significant because they so thoroughly document a critical period of change and growth in the history of American fisheries. Working the Sea provides a curated look at more than one hundred of those images, highlighting the grit, drama, resourcefulness, practical minutiae, and sometimes epic feats that characterize this essential and iconic industry. The book includes an introduction that puts the importance of the collections in context. Expanded captions that accompany each photograph.Author Bio
Michael Crowley spent several years working on halibut longliners in the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea. He has also worked as Contributing Editor and Field Editor for National Fisherman and has worked as a correspondent for WorkBoat magazine, specializing in stories related to new vessel construction and new gear. He lives in Maine.
Penobscot Marine Museum
Since 1936, Penobscot Marine Museum has been sharing an ever-expanding collection of stories and histories from Maine’s coastal communities spanning centuries. Located in Searsport, Maine, the museum has a campus of historical homes and buildings that display and share art, objects, photos, documents, and small boats. In-person visitors explore Maine’s working waterfronts through hands-on exhibits, historical artifacts, fine art, and a research library. Online visitors join lectures and workshops broadcast free to the public, and also search historical databases of the museum’s collection, which contains more than 500,000 photos, objects, and documents. All of the Penobscot Marine Museum offerings serve to spread the stories of the tightly-knit communities of Mainers whose lives and livelihoods have long been sustained on or by the sea. More information is available online at penobscotmarinemuseum.org
