A traditional way of living is seen anew> Fishing way of life portrayed

UP RIVER: THE STORY OF A MAINE FISHING COMMUNITY, a photobook by Olive Pierce, with text by Carolyn Chute, University of New England Press, 1996, 119 pages, soft cover, $19.95.

“Up River: The Story of a Maine Fishing Community” is a picture book that tells a story. At first glance, it may seem that Massachusetts photographer Olive Pierce has reached into the archives of black-and-white documentary photography and come up with a historical record of seafaring clans from the 19th century.

But Pierce’s subjects — the Carters and the Harveys, who are two major families in a fishing community near Waldoboro — are living in the 20th century. They just look like they come from an utterly vanquished era because their lifestyles do, indeed, hark back to an era when people integrated their families, work and back yards, a time when “fair chance” was more powerful than a time card.

One reason these families look misplaced in contemporary time is the style of photography Pierce uses. She relies on stark prints that are dark and grainy. She catches the motion and the muddiness of a harsh and proud underclass life that is robust but has had to weather changes. Lest these Mainers compare poorly with the migrant families of John Steinbeck’s novels, Pierce also shows a jubilance between families at a dinner table, between fishermen in a boat shed, and between wild children whose imaginations create playgrounds in the requisite piles of yard junk. But the photos always look like they come from another time when American life was harder on the bones and the world seemed to make smaller revolutions each day.

The portrait of this community is enhanced by “word pictures” by Carolyn Chute, author of “The Beans of Egypt, Maine.” In contrast to Pierce’s unadorned photos, Chute’s poetic snippets are abstruse. “Brother, I see in your eyes, the memory of tonight’s rest,” she writes in “Out to Sea,” the final section of the book. Her words slow the reader down in the same way Pierce’s camera can when it subtly captures the way fishermen’s wives are forced to be strong and underclass eyes are trained to be shifty around outsiders. In this way, Chute’s language is as intimate a portrayal as Pierce’s photos.

Chute took on this project, she says, because she recognized the subject — the tough and relentless Mainer — in the same way Pierce does. Fortunately, the collaborators both stop short of glorification. Folks such as the Carters and Harveys have something to teach us about the essence of community, the authors believe. But one might find it hard to live their lives.

A 23-page introduction gives a brief history of these fishing families and how Pierce, who has had her work shown in galleries and also wrote the photobook “No Easy Roses: A Look at the Lives of City Teenagers” (1986), came to know them so well. In the 1950s, she and her former husband bought land on Vinalhaven and summered there. Twenty years later, Fern Carter, a local fisherman, took her out on a haul. Ten years after that, he asked her to photograph his son’s wedding. For the next five years, Pierce photographed the entire extended family and its neighbors. “Up River” — its prose reflections, poetic images and 63 photographs — is the result.

Pierce went out on the boats, into the kitchens and beyond the fog and snow that create a Maine aura. She writes (and occasionally without the benefit of an able copy editor) of her slow acceptance into the community and makes cogent observations about the resourcefulness and durability of these industrious people.

That’s what Pierce is showing. She knows she has latched onto a way of life that must be documented because it is antiquated and disappearing rapidly. And really, there’s no way to stop that change. Large corporations in Japan and land developers down state have deeply grabbed hold of coastal Maine, and the Harveys and Carters are the ones who stand to suffer. They don’t like Republicans, seat belt laws and no-trespassing signs. As salty Mainers, they are autocrats who are, at times, given to a lawlessness and rowdiness that don’t make good bedfellows with the bureaucracy and gentrification inching up the coast.

“I am convinced that it is only by reducing the general to the specific that we can make room for change in our own and other people’s hearts,” she writes in the preface. Whether depicting the proud belly of Fern or the raging swells of Georges Bank, Pierce’s photographs whisk us into the lives of a truly American people and stir us in an attempt to make us look a bit more understandingly at the treasures of another community’s junk.