Fishworm — a Xerox-based photobook from central Maine
Fishworm does not organise rural memory into something clean or stable. The book keeps its material close to its damaged state: mould, runoff, cheap toner, torn edges, ghostly snapshots, local reports, discarded magazines, animals, children, junk, weather. What survives here survives in pieces.
Pia Paulina Guilmoth and Jesse Bull Saffire do not present central Maine as document or nostalgia, but as a place sifted through by hand — inhabited, distrusted, and reassembled. The Xerox texture is not incidental. It refuses refinement. Instead of restoration, the Fishworm photobook works through abrasion, clutter, and stubborn attachment, until debris begins to read like a social history that never intended to become an archive.
The source material is scavenged: family archive photographs, found imagery, rural ephemera. Guilmoth draws on the same territory she has worked across her practice — queer life in rural Maine, the unstable boundary between tenderness and threat, the way place accumulates and erodes simultaneously. Her book Flowers Drink the River reached the shortlist of the 2025 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards, and Fishworm extends that inquiry into more abrasive, collaborative terrain.
Jesse Bull Saffire's role in the book is not decorative. She describes herself as a community organiser rather than an artist, and that position shapes what the book is. Fishworm is not built from aesthetic distance. It comes from shared life, local knowledge, scavenging, and a practiced closeness to the social and material remains of a place. The collaboration is structural, not supplementary.
Published by Void Photo in 2025, the Fishworm photobook is part of a broader Photobooks catalogue that takes the form and production of the book seriously as a critical choice. The softcover with poster dust jacket, the Xerox-based printing, the 232-page count — none of these are incidental. They are the argument.
Pia Paulina Guilmoth & Jesse Bull Saffire
Pia Paulina Guilmoth lives and works in rural central Maine. Her work moves between queer life, place, memory, and the unstable boundary between tenderness and threat. Her book Flowers Drink the River reached the shortlist of the 2025 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards.
Jesse Bull Saffire describes herself not as an artist but as a community organiser. In Fishworm, that position is structural: the book is not built from distance, but from shared life, local knowledge, scavenging, and a practiced closeness to the social and material remains of place.
