3 days ago
A Gloucester of another century, when fishing was king, returns in pictures
Blatchford (1868-1947) was a Gloucester native. After a few years living in Boston and Kittery, Maine, he returned home and never left. He spent four decades working as a bookkeeper for the New England Fish Company. His workspace overlooked the inner harbor. Think of his office window as a much larger version of a viewfinder.
Blatchford started photographing in the 1890s, and the 27 photographs in 'Down to the Sea'(drawn from more than 250 in CAM's collection) date from that decade and up through 1913. This was a time when some 350 fishing vessels were working out of Gloucester.
Ernest L. Blatchford, "Launch of the schooner Helen Miller Gould at John Bishop's Shipyard, Vincent Cove, Gloucester," 1900.
Cape Ann Museum
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Blatchford was an amateur photographer. Amateur can mean more than just not a professional. It tends to get forgotten that the word derives from the Latin 'amator,' 'lover,' and Blatchford's feeling for his subject matter can be felt in every image. Even more important than the obvious knowledge and experience he brought to bear was a sense of emotional connection.
Ernest L. Blatchford, "Tugboat Startle in Gloucester's Inner Harbor," circa 1900.
Cape Ann Museum
Gifted
amateur would be a more precise description of Blatchford. Although he was less concerned with form than content, his work has a lot going for it formally. Blatchford was a member of the Cape Ann Camera Club. One of the club's goals was 'to show the rest of New England that we can keep abreast of the times.' This Blatchford did. The graceful plume of steam from a tugboat in Gloucester Harbor evokes Pictorialism, the most artistically ambitious photographic movement of the era.
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Elsewhere one notes the elegant spindliness of the bare masts of an iced-in schooner; the foamy wave raised by the launch of a schooner; the way Blatchford nearly fills the frame with the pile of salt that two sailors are shoveling in the hold of a ship. The removal of any larger context adds to the in-drawing unreality of the scene.
Ernest L. Blatchford, "Shoveling salt in the hold of a salt bank in Gloucester Harbor," circa 1900.
Cape Ann Museum
Salting fish was crucially important in preservation. It was the reality of the fishing industry as well as its romance that drew Blatchford. The variety, too. He photographed not just fishing schooners, but also barks, sloops, shipwrecks, lighthouses, ferries, tugboats, and a US Customs launch. It was later used during Prohibition to chase rumrunners. That kind of detail is representative of how informative and thorough the wall texts are.
'Down to the Sea' honors Blatchford's documentary impulse with an ample selection of items relating to the industry. Three dozen objects related to fishing are in display cases. They lend a three-dimensional immediacy to the world we see in two dimensions in Blatchford's photographs. The items are marvelous as objects — many could be works of vernacular sculpture — and bear names no less marvelous. There are thole pins (to support oars), baggywrinkles (woven coverings for cables), wooden fids (a tool of conical shape used on rope and canvas), a heaver (a lever), a marlinspike (for rope work), a monkey's fist (a kind of knot used to secure the end of a rope).
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Less esoteric are net-mending needles, glass floats, a wheelbarrow, a block with swivel hook and tackle, and both a fog horn
and
a speaking horn. Two insurance maps of the harbor area in 1917 give a rich sense of how much was going on there commercially. Of special note are a full-size in-shore dory, circa 1900, and two models. One is of a fishing schooner, the John Hay Hammond. The other, and it's truly a thing of enchantment, is of a steam ferry from the early teens, the Little Giant.
Ernest L. Blatchford, "Waterboat Aqua Pura in Gloucester Harbor," circa 1900.
Cape Ann Museum
So much of the fascination of 'Down to the Sea' is the window it offers on a now-distant world. There's one photograph, though, that feels depressingly prophetic. It shows the Aqua Pura, a water boat that serviced the fishing fleet. Ads cover its sail. Baggywrinkles and wooden fids are all well and good, but even 125 years ago you couldn't get away from branding and marketing.
DOWN TO THE SEA: The Photographs of Ernest L. Blatchford
At Cape Ann Museum, CAM Green campus, 13 Poplar St., Gloucester, through Sept. 28. 978-283-0455,
Mark Feeney can be reached at
