Craig Easton - Fisherwomen

Hi Craig, your project seems very timely with Brexit and British fishing industry, but it also reveals a local tradition that not everyone is necessarily aware of. Could you please tell us, when and how did this project start?

I’ve worked in and around fishing communities and in the highlands and islands of Scotland for many years and I knew the history of fisherwomen from books like Neil M. Gunn’s classic, ’Silver Darlings', and from the paintings of Winslow Homer, John McGhie and others. I was also familiar with the old photographs and the stories of the ‘herring girls’ and how, whilst the fleet followed the migrating shoals by sea, the women would travel on land, mirroring the fishermen’s journey stopping in each port to pack and gut the herring on bustling quaysides. It got me to thinking…who is doing that work now?

And of course the answer was still women, only nowadays they work almost entirely unseen in processing factories and smokehouses all around the coast. So I started knocking on doors and making some portraits in these places. This was in 2013. For the first couple of years, that’s what I did - portraits of contemporary fisherwomen in modern factories. It worked as a set, but I wanted to explore the story further and so, knowing the backstory, I decided to follow the route of the traditional herring trade from Shetland to Great Yarmouth. Each year the shoals would arrive in Shetland in May or June and migrate down the length of the east coast finishing in the winter months in the English seaside resorts of Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft. I decided to present the work in three strands: the contemporary portraits; portraits of former herring girls (who are now all in their 80s and 90s) and a series of large format b&w landscapes of the route. The idea was that in the past each of these fishing ports had a tangible connection to the others: Shetlanders knew Yarmouth and Hull folk knew Fraserburgh etc. I wanted to remake that connection so that in the exhibitions, the landscape and environment of each location would add weight to the portraits and help audiences understand the historical connections.

Finally, of course, I was interested in the way fisherwomen had inspired artists and photographers in the past - something that goes all the way back to the very origins of photography with what are widely considered to be the very first social documentary photographs ever made: the portraits of Newhaven Fisherwomen by Hill & Adamson in the early 1840s. When I look at those pictures now, it is almost uncanny how, but for the colour and rubber boots, today’s fisherwomen hardly differ from their forebears. Right through the latter part of the 19th century fisherwomen continued to inspire artists: Homer, McGhie, the Joblings in Northumberland and photographer Frank Meadow Sutcliffe in Whitby. This seemed to go on until the first world war and after that the focus shifted away from presenting the fisherwomen as the subject of the work and more towards wider editorial depictions of the quaysides. I wanted to put the spotlight back on the women themselves.

The images are fresh, energetic and very honest, we could tell that you manage to establish a personal relation with those women. Are you able to share some more insights on any of the women you photographed?

Or they established a ‘personal relationship’ with me, more like. I tell you, I took my life in my hands going into some of those fish houses being taunted and ribbed by gangs of women all singing and shouting! 

But seriously, I was very much welcomed. A lot of the women told me how pleased they were that someone was turning the attention back on the women - fishing and fishermen have long been the focus of photographers, but it seemed like it had been a long, long time since the women were the subject of anyones focus.

I’m glad you find them ‘fresh, energetic and honest’ - that's very kind of you. It’s interesting, I don’t try to overanalyse the way I work in portraiture, I think if you have a genuine interest in people and a desire to hear their story, people open up to you. I suppose that knowing a lot of the history and being able to demonstrate that I was genuinely passionate about the project went a long way towards ensuring I was welcomed by the people I met. Very often I would explain to the younger women why I was interested, that I wanted to connect their experience to the long tradition of women working in fishing and I would show them some of the old pictures, tell them some of the old stories and they’d be amazed. They knew they felt a great pride in their work, but they didn’t know how they were continuing in a role that had historically been handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter for centuries.

Alongside the photographs I made audio recordings of some of the women’s stories….and some of them are extraordinary, the tales of young women going away from family in groups of three aged 16 or 17, the camaraderie  the extraordinary hard work and working conditions etc etc. Even the story of a female trawler skipper out of North Shields in the 1970s who recounts how she had been ‘over the wall’ and nearly lost at sea on three occasions.

Do you think the role of women in the British fishing industry is jeopardised by the lack of young generations taking on traditional jobs in rural contexts?

I don’t know. It’s changed of course from its heyday when there were thousands and thousands of women that would travel to Shetland for the start of each season. Now with factory ships and chilling/processing the catch happening at sea, there is just less work around on shore, I suppose. That’s true of a lot of traditional industry of course as mechanisation replaced man or womanpower and larger companies have taken over the smaller family firms. It’s interesting however that this was always a migratory trade and still now the processing houses are filled with women from far and wide: Eastern Europeans, Malaysians, Portuguese etc.

Celebrating women’s role in British society is a commendable task is this part of a broader series touching on different industries?

Not especially, it was really a particular focus on fisherwomen to hopefully try to redress the balance, to shine a little light into those processing houses where women were still doing extraordinary skilled work and to deliberately make the connection to both the fisherwomen of the past and also to the artists and photographers who had represented them. I felt like it was a story that needed telling and had not been told for a long long time. As part of the project I’ve made numerous audio recordings of conversations with the women and in the case of the former herring girls, it seemed especially important to record these stories now. If they weren’t documented now, then the time would be gone and the opportunity missed. I felt like that was important to do and both a joy and a privilege to be able to do it.

Finally, how was the life of “Fisherwomen” affected by the current pandemic?

New publisher, Ten O’Clock Books are making a beautiful large format portfolio publication of some of the pictures and stories from the project - it was scheduled to be released in April, but the most immediate impact of the pandemic is that they have had to delay printing and delivery of that. 

The work is sitting at the printers ready to go, but obviously on hold whilst the whole world deals with the pressing problem of the spread of the coronavirus.

We’ve been very fortunate however that people have been very understanding and have pre-ordered books in what I think is a show of solidarity with artists and photographers who’s work and income has been affected by current events, so I’m super pleased that people have continued to order the book and we hope it will be delivered as soon as possible once the crisis abates.

Pre-orders are available from www.tenoclockbooks.com

The second impact is on the touring exhibitions. FISHERWOMEN was first shown last year at Montrose Museum and Art Gallery in Scotland, then at the Hull Maritime Museum in the autumn. Multiple exhibitions are scheduled for this summer at The Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther; St. Andrews University; Cromer Museum and in Lowestoft - all of those are in danger of being lost or postponed. The next big show is at the Time and Tide Museum in Great Yarmouth scheduled for October 2020 - March 2021, so I’m hopeful that that one will go ahead as planned and discussions about future shows are on hold too as museums and galleries all reorganise their calendars.

One piece of good news however is that this time gives me an opportunity to transcribe all the audio interviews I’ve done over the years….I’m very slow at transcription, but it’s a joy to be able to listen to the stories, hear the accents and be transported back to Shetland, or Yarmouth or North Shields whilst I sit in splendid isolation in my studio.