Writer and photographer Lawrence Earley’s new book, “The Workboats of Core Sound: Stories and Photographs of a Changing World,” explores the histories of old wooden fishing boats and the lives of fishermen and boat builders in eastern North Carolina.
Earley will share selections from his book of essays, interviews and photographs at Wilson Library today. Staff writer Juanita Chavarro spoke with Earley about the subjects and stories that brought the book together.
Daily Tar Heel: What does your book focus on, and what was your process for collecting these interviews and photographs?
Lawrence Earley: Over the years, there have been many fishing villages that have arisen along the peninsula from Beaufort out to Cedar Island, and each one of them developed their own tradition of building boats. What I did in my work was document boats and areas closest to the Core Sound area by photographing them and also by talking to the people who lived there, who were mostly fishermen or boat builders.
It was amazing the kinds of information that a boat in a simple photograph would contain. People would remember all the people that were connected with a boat. They might tell me who built it and the year that it was built. These aren’t recently built boats — the oldest one that I found was built in 1919, and other boats were built in the ’20s and the ’30s.
DTH: What did you enjoy about getting to meet all of the different fishermen and their families?
LE: I found the people I dealt with almost uniformly were very interested in talking to me because I wanted to talk to them about their lives or about the boats, which are very central to their lives. I was down there for about seven or eight years. I still go down there quite a bit, and I’ve made a lot of friends. That was one of the great things — not just people being hospitable to me and inviting me into their homes, but people having me over for dinner and calling me up while I was back in Raleigh.
DTH: How did you get started putting this book together?
LE: I started it in 2005, but I actually started taking pictures back in the 1980s. The earliest picture in the book was taken in 1985. I first started going down there about that time, but it was more as a tourist discovering the place for the first time. It was really in 2004 when I had a show of photographs down on Harkers Island that people began to talk to me about the photographs and the information that the boats contained. They were telling me all about each boat that I had in my photographs, and that’s when I realized that this would be a great project to continue.
