Fishworm

Fishworm – scavenged photobook from rural Maine

Fishworm is a dense Xerox photobook by Pia Paulina Guilmoth and Jesse Bull Saffire, built from seven years of scavenging within a sixty-mile orbit of their home in rural central Maine. Abandoned houses collapsing into the earth, mould-streaked cardboard boxes, hunting camps, junk-shops and yard sale leftovers all feed into the layered visual field of Fishworm, where domestic comfort and mildew, chaos and small celebrations occupy the same worn page.

Among the debris are family photographs, town reports, forgotten newspapers and images from Pia’s own archive, combined with low-resolution digital photographs made while trespassing and searching for material. On the beat-up Xerox machine that anchors the project, these fragments are repeatedly copied, degraded and reassembled, so that Fishworm becomes a scrambled history of old mill towns and pine-shadowed villages, somewhere between antique ephemera and Y2K noise.

Printed at 21.6 × 28 cm over 232 pages in an edition of 1000 copies, this softcover photobook with poster dustjacket continues the trajectory opened by Flowers Drink the River, extending Guilmoth and Saffire’s attention to marginal, queer and stubbornly local stories. Fishworm sits within contemporary independent photobook publishing as a rough, persistent object: a record of lives that never asked to be preserved, yet remain.