Introductions and captions by Calvin Siegal and Llewellyn Howland III
David R. Godine, Publishers, 2007
128 pp., $40

A Quiet Love Affair with a Disappearing Culture

Several hundred years B.C. the Greek poet Homer, gazing a-sea at leaning old craft, sails puffed, skimming his local horizon, wrote in The Odyssey: “…their ships are swift as a bird or a thought..” Later Joseph Conrad wrote, “the ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet.” Seeing comes before words — and words have come to us long before that mechanical eye, the camera, which captured from its outset a moment in time, in quite another way of seeing than an artist’s rendering, or memory.

Norman Fortier grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, working after high school for the local newspaper as a photographer. Then came Pearl Harbor. The U.S. Navy trained him in aerial photography. Back home, the owner of the Concordia boatyard offered to build Fortier a small studio on boatyard land. Thus began, in 1947, Fortier’s long association with the bay and its boats. He bought a 22-foot runabout, naming it Norman Fortier Photographer, roaming the nearby waters, snapping photos of the avid racers of the yacht clubs, the Bermuda racers — whatever — keeping careful records of boats and owners and where and when the photo was taken, sending rough prints to owners eager to have his artistic renderings. His career, his renown, was on its way. Calvin Siegal, Llewellyn Howland and photography editor Michael Lapides have selected from thousands of possible black-and-white negatives (Fortier did venture later into color photography and watercolors) these utterly wonderful, often breathtaking views of water, wind, clouds, islands, the formative aspects effected by the well known wild southwesterlies dominant in Buzzard’s Bay and its nearby waters.

Fortier aimed his camera not only at sleek racers designed by the famous marine architects of the 20th century. As Howland writes, “Norm carried on a quiet love affair with the fishing vessels and working small craft of Buzzard’s Bay and Vineyard Sound, with traditional schooners and catboats, with coastal beaches and dunes in the off season, with the headlands and seamarks and bights and coves that set our coast apart from any other…” He did not necessarily expect to sell all his shots, but realized that “an entire maritime culture was fast disappearing and that, if he did not record its passing, no one would.” This collection “includes some of the best of these haunting images.”

There are sailors high in ratlines; or on page 4, a 50-foot racer scudding toward a finish line, the background dark with fog and storm clouds, her spinnaker grazing the water. We see heart-rending wreckage following Hurricane Carol of 1954; aerial photos of harbors then and more recently; harbors, knockdowns, disasters on some rocky shore; and many photos of New Bedford’s fishing fleet at its commercial zenith. One pauses at the ethereal restored J boat Shamrock V, deep-reefed, plodding low in the whitecapped bay against a somber sky.

Here in the Northeast we are pulling our watercraft ashore these shortening chilly days, but a gem such as this stirs yearnings, pulling our toes seaward to the edge of the tide. I think of Joshua Slocum and his lone journeys: “…the SPRAY rode, now like a bird on the crest of a wave, and now like a waif deep down in the hollow between seas…but with always a thrill, yes, of delight…”

That delight is captured here so essentially you will turn from the last page, back to the beginning.

Hannah Merker reviews books in Bristol, Maine.