Whether he’s shooting portraits of commercial fishermen, tugboat pilots or Mainers digging seaworms while up to their elbows in soft mud, his work is intentionally that of a documentarian. Michael Cevoli photographs boatbuilders, quahoggers, gillnetters, fly fishermen, dragger men, war vets, charter captains and old salts whose eyes have grown cloudy, but whose stories still trickle out like a young flood tide.
“The first photographers I looked at were street and documentary photographers,” says Cevoli, 41, who lives in Warren, Rhode Island. “Those were the genres that I was drawn to.”
Cevoli resides in a bright second-floor apartment that’s a stone’s throw from the water. The walls are covered in photographs and artifacts—a clam rake, rod and reel, bleached white cow skull, a small oil painting of a dragger done by a grandfather. In one bedroom hangs a large, framed photo of a commercial conch boat from his first professional marine shoot.
Cevoli, whose work has been featured in over the years, takes pictures of both pleasure boats and commercial
