Fleming’s exhibit, “Island Life,” on view through November 11, documents life on the Chesapeake’s only inhabited offshore islands, Smith Island and Tangier Island. Preserving traditions dating back to the islands’ settlement in the late 1600s, many of the islanders still make their living from the Bay’s waters, but rising sea levels, subsiding land and environmental stresses on the Bay and the species it supports threaten both their homes and their livelihoods.
The mingling of exquisite beauty and a sense of wrenching loss so apparent in “Sinking Workboat” is repeated throughout this show. The shimmering warmth of low sunlight on a venerable workboat is made poignant by its name, spelled out in peeling paint along its bow, “Last Call,” while across the gallery is “Abandoned House on Smith Island,” a shot of a weathered and broken-windowed home standing bravely amidst scraggly bushes and weeds.
The son of a National Geographic photographer, Fleming has his father’s skill at documentation, and he uses his talents and deep knowledge of the Chesapeake region both to earn a living as a commercial photographer and to pursue his passion for documentary art. His photographs are often seen on the covers of such magazines as Wooden Boat and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Save the Bay, and he recently published a stunning book of photographs called Working the Water that chronicles the lives of the Bay’s watermen.
What sets Fleming’s work apart is not just his skill and his easy familiarity with human interactions with the Bay and its creatures, but perhaps most importantly, his dazzling ability to make change visible. Heart-wrenching photos of abandoned houses have become ubiquitous in articles about rising sea levels, but Fleming captured his standing in eerie stillness while a flight of blackbirds swoops away under a lowering sky. A riveting glimpse of the last moment before the birds disappear and the fury of the storm begins, it’s a potent metaphor for the plight of these sinking islands and the loss of a way of life.
It’s a puzzle how Fleming manages to create many of these photographs. Somehow, he’s in the right place at the right time, focused and ready to shoot. “Rockfish and Blue Crab” captures these iconic denizens of the Bay together in an underwater double portrait so crisp and colorful that, again, it seems as if it’s out of a dream. Likewise, “Above the Buyboat Delvin K” catches a graceful dance of oyster boats seen from above as they shimmy up to a buy boat to transfer their daily catch. It’s pure beauty, and it’s all about fleeting moments and changing times, laced through with the inkling that what we’re seeing will never be the same.