© Paul Mozell

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Gloucester Massachusetts is America’s oldest seaport. Founded in 1623, it remains the heart of maritime culture on the North Shore and Cape Ann. Although vibrant, colorful, and salty through and through, Gloucester’s fishing community is a shadow of its former self. I’ve been roaming the waterfront of Gloucester since 1980 when I first emigrated to Massachusetts, but I’m definitely an outsider. There is so much to this small city that draws me to its streets and shoreline. Gloucester boasts a unique history of boat building, a beautiful rocky granite coast,  traditions of both commercial and sport fishing, architecture ranging from grand waterfront mansions to modest fishing-family homes, and a powerful cross-fertilization of earthiness and diversity.

Artists and photographers like me have been drawn to  Cape Ann region for hundreds of years, for good reason. Galleries and studios are all over town; particularly at Rocky Neck, which calls itself  “America’s Oldest Art Colony”.  This is where Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper made some of their most famous paintings. Don’t come here if you are looking for T-shirt shops and cheap souvenirs.

I recently spent a long day looking for photographs of the waterfront. Some of my best images were the result of conversations with people repairing lobster traps, loading ice into pickup trucks, and making repairs to just about everything. Times are tough here in Gloucester and not just because of the foundering economy. The relationships between fishermen, state and federal politicians, environmentalists, and regulatory bodies, are tense and multi-leveled. When I asked some folks if they would talk to a reporter/photographer about the state of commercial fishing, the initial response was universally negative, yet polite. It would take a long time to build credibility and trust, they implied. These fisherman been burned too many times before. Good intentions alone won’t cut it, from their point of view.

Geno Mondello runs The Dory Shop at the Gloucester Maritime Heritage Center. With the assistance of interns, Geno builds beautiful rowing dories the way they were built 100 years ago—from white pine and red oak. No plywood or fiberglass in this shop. The result is a sleek, flat-bottomed, high-sided boat that is ideal for filling with your catch of ground fish or, as is more likely these days, rowing with a friend around Gloucester harbor for fitness and fun. It turned out that Geno and I have some shared heritage, so to speak. He once ran a large photography lab on the North Shore, until the digital photography revolution took all the fun and profit out of the industry. Today, he is a part-time fisherman when he isn’t building boats. Check out the shop yourself, and commission a boat from him! I haven’t rowed one yet, but I’m going to angle for an opportunity.

A couple of men working on a pier on Rocky Neck said that I should go down to The Gloucester Seafood Display Auction if I wanted to see a trawler offload its catch. Pushing aside a large clear plastic paneled curtain, I walked into a huge refrigerated warehouse. A man driving a forklift said that I was just in time to see the trawler “Harmony” begin to unload. Around the corner on the pier I found a lot of activity. Six or eight men in yellow and orange slickers were preparing boxes of ice to receive the fish. A man seated in a small enclosed platform facing the trawler, was preparing to operate a crane that lifts buckets of fish from the hold of the boat. Another man on the deck of Horizon was arranging lines for the lift, and presiding over the activity below deck. Captain David Haggerty kept an eye on all the activity and was kind enough to grant me permission to photograph the goings-on.

On the pier, two men in business suits hustled about and made notes on clipboards. A smiling woman sat with her clipboard beside a pile of wooden palettes, and used a hand-held mechanical counter to record the number of loads coming off the boat. Other people moved around on forklifts and on foot, as part of a practiced routine that moves smoothly and efficiently. I learned that the harvest from this one week voyage was 60,000 pounds of haddock, pollack, and cod. Horizon is part of a 5 boat operation.

On future excursions to Gloucester I hope to record activity in the ship yards, off loading some smaller boats, and more of the faces that make this town so unique and colorful. Readers of this blog are welcome to submit suggestions or offer referrals to interesting people and locations on Cape Ann.

Oak Bluffs-Tisbury Bridge

Today I photographed a temporary bridge erected by my client connecting Oak Bluffs and W. Tisbury on Martha’s Vineyard. My pilot, based at Hascom Field, flew me and my cameras in a top-wing Cessna, for the non-stop 2 hour round trip. This shot was taken at 1000 feet through the open window, at 125 mph. I declined the offer to wing-walk.

I drove up the coast from Salisbury, Massachusetts to York, Maine one beautiful blue afternoon in May, looking for inlets, outlets, and the tide.