For Jay Fleming, a body of water is his body of work.
Over the past decade and a half, the Annapolis native has devoted himself to visually documenting the Chesapeake Bay. His Nikon camera freezes in time indelible images of life on and underneath the water: sea-cured men dredging for oysters, blue crabs bobbing, wading birds wading and skipjacks casting rippling reflections in the tide.
Along the way, Fleming, 36, has established himself as one of the region's top nature photographers. He has compiled his photographs into a pair of books: Working the Water (2016) and Island Life (2021). His work has also been seen on display at gallery exhibits and gracing the walls of countless businesses and homes.
As the son of a photographer and state wildlife official, Jay Fleming came naturally to his passion for photographing nature on the Chesapeake Bay.
His mother is an official with the Maryland Department of Natural resources, and his father is a former National Geographic staff photographer. It might seem like he was practically born into the business, but his initial path was circuitous.
Fleming graduated from St. Mary's College in Southern Maryland with a degree in economics. After stints with the Maryland DNR and the National Park Service at Yellowstone, he found his calling as a photographer for Maryland's seafood marketing program. Within a few years, he left that job to concentrate on his own photography full time.
In addition to selling his prints, he shoots assignments for glossy magazines and leads photography workshops on the Bay and around the world.
"Every time I'm out on the water and I can watch the sun come up, I consider myself fortunate," he said. "When I'm out on the water on a Monday and I think about all the people I know who have to sit in an office, I know that I picked the right path for myself."
The Bay Journal caught up with Fleming during a rare moment on land at his office and gallery on Maryland's Kent Island. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Question: How did you end up pursuing the Bay as the subject of your art?
Answer: I grew up in a photography family. My dad [Kevin Fleming] was a photographer. He basically shot for about 50 years, and he worked for National Geographic. My dad was over in Delaware, and we would always go out shooting together. And it got to a point where we got really competitive when I was, like, 15 years old.
Sometimes, I was actually shooting better pictures than him, which bothered him. But we still enjoyed it. At a certain point, I realized I needed to find my own territory. I had grown up on the Bay fishing and crabbing, kayaking, all that, so that's when I kind of took a deep dive into what was going on in the Bay.
Q: Did you ever take any formal photography classes?
Photographer Jay Fleming has focused his career on the Chesapeake Bay.
A: Nope. I took AP studio art in high school. But other than that, no formal training — just learning on my own and learning by mistake.
Q: You've been successful working your way into the waterman culture. How were you able to win that trust?
A: What I do is an incredibly valuable marketing tool for the seafood industry. It's bridging the gap between the seafood harvesters, the seafood processors and then the consumer. So, it's educating people as to where the product is coming from, the process by which it's being brought to shore and the people who are involved with it.
Q: So, you call up a waterman and say, "Hey, can I hop on your boat with you at 5 a.m.?"
A: Pretty much, yeah. There's a little more to it than that. But finding the right boat to go out with involves finding the people who are following the [regulatory and legal] rules because people who aren't following the rules — they're not going to want to be photographed.
Q: Tell me about your first book, Working the Water.
A: That idea of documenting the whole seafood industry was really inspired by a couple of people. Art Daniels, who was a skipjack captain on Deal Island, was the first one who led me out to shoot pictures on a workboat. I went out dredging with him in the winter. I connected with him through his grandson, Lee Daniels, who works for the state now. I got to see that whole process, and I really became interested in seeing more of it.
Q: The number of watermen on the Bay continues to dwindle. Sea level rise threatens many remaining islands. Does that drive you, this idea that "if I don't do this now, it may be lost to history"?
A: Absolutely. That was how I felt about my [second] book, Island Life, even more. Smith Island and Tangier Island [the Bay's last inhabited offshore islands] have changed a lot since I started working on that book in 2010. I shot a picture of the last house on Holland Island about six months before it went into the water [in 2010]. That picture's become somewhat of a historical piece because it was, like, the last time anybody went out there and really documented that house before it was completely gone.
Q: It gives you an appreciation for what the future might be.
A: I saw Holland Island foreshadowing what could happen to Smith Island and Tangier Island. A lot of other islands in the Bay have disappeared or are disappearing, so it's not a new phenomenon. But the idea of having these active communities with a working seafood economy still happening on them going away within our lifetimes is pretty scary. And I knew that I needed to document that.
Q: Is there anything we can do to help these communities?
A: Buy local seafood and ask where your seafood is coming from. As an individual, that's what you can do to support the seafood industry: Buy local seafood.
Q: The current Chesapeake Bay cleanup agreement expires in 2025. Do you have any advice on restoring the Bay going forward?
A: I think a lot of emphasis needs to be put on these [invasive] blue catfish. I think we spend a lot of effort and money on projects that really have no tangible deliverables. There's nothing where we can say, "Oh, look what we've done." You need some sort of suppression program, [so] you could go and say, "Look, we killed 2 million blue catfish."
Listen to the full interview at bayjournal.com/podcasts.
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