the Exhibition
Photographer Jay Fleming has been making trips to the Chesapeake Bay’s offshore islands for more than a decade to document the ever-changing landscapes and communities. Jay’s first trip to the islands was by kayak in the spring of 2009 to photograph a nesting colony of Brown Pelicans on Shanks Island, Virginia—a small, disappearing island on the lower end of the Smith Island archipelago.
Just as the landscapes and wildlife of the islands sparked his photographic interests, Jay became drawn to the communities on both Smith and Tangier islands—the only two inhabited offshore islands left in the Chesapeake. As a documentary photographer, he wanted to learn more about how the isolation of these communities and their dependence on the resources of the Bay had shaped them. After dozens of trips to Smith and Tangier to photograph their people, commercial fisheries, and towns, Jay has become a familiar face. The islanders have come to accept him into their culture, acknowledging his photography as a tool to preserve and document their unique way of life. Beyond Smith and Tangier, Jay has also documented the current state of the islands that were formerly inhabited—Hollands, Bloodsworth, and Watts—to tell their story, one of erosion eating away at shorelines until whole communities are forced to flee.
Jay’s photography of the Bay’s islands is not only beautiful, it is purposeful. He describes his Island Life body of work as a time capsule into the Bay islands during the 10 plus years he has been visiting. The photography in this exhibition will be part of Jay’s forthcoming book, Island Life, to be published in the fall of 2021. ★