The Junk-Shop by the Waterfall
The book Fishworm, by Pia Paulina Guilmoth and Jesse Bull Saffire, is the result of the authors’ wanderings and scavenging within a sixty-mile orbit of their home, in rural Maine.
By Gaia Squarci. Photographs by Pia Paulina Guilmoth and Jesse Bull Saffire.
For seven years, photographers Pia Paulina Guilmoth and Jesse Bull Saffire have worked their way through abandoned, collapsing houses, home parties, and rowdy scenes of people running loose in nature. They shot across a rural landscape of damp cardboard boxes and yard sale remains, drawn to the rough, spooky, but ultimately free edge of life. Guided by instinct, they entered spaces most people avoid.
Shot on 8-megapixel digital cameras and interwoven with images from Guilmoth’s family archive, the photographs shift through association and dissonance. The book unfolds as a visceral but playful fever dream. A lace tablecloth becomes a spiderweb, a nipple, the eye of a deer.
“Everything was done on a beat-up Xerox machine we found sitting in the rain outside the fire department on Heavy Dump Day, 2024. The pages are a rearranged scrambled up history of old mill towns and pine-shadowed villages, somewhere between antique and Y2K. Debris and rituals, chaos and celebration, mildew and domestic comfort.”
The book Fishworm is published by VOID and available at the price of 48€.
