Fishworm

For years, Pia Paulina Guilmoth and Jesse Bull Saffire scavenged within a sixty-mile orbit of their home: people’s trash piles, abandoned houses, yard sales, flea markets, mould-streaked cardboard boxes, a politician’s discarded gay porn collection. They found family photos, town reports, forgotten newspapers — fragments of lives slipping out of memory.Fishworm collects these rescues, re-assemblies, and accidents. Among them are photographs taken by Pia and Jesse on 8 MP digital cameras while trespassing and scavenging for material, alongside images from Pia’s own family archive. “Fishworm came from being really cold and stir-crazy. Last year, we were thinking about the overflowing boxes of junk that I – eventually we – had collected over the past seven years and how they could be turned into something. Earlier that year, we had found an old Xerox machine outside of the fire station, which worked, and we just kinda started sorting through the boxes, and every time we found a ‘good’ photo, we would scan and print it on the Xerox until three months had passed and there was a stack of over 500 prints.The first books I ever made in 2011 were really scrappy Xerox zines that I would drop off at a record store in Portland. I’ve always been obsessed with the way Xerox renders things.”“Years ago, I found so many amazing negatives in a desk at a local, eerie, abandoned school that had been empty and partially flooded for six years. A friend and I snuck in through a broken window, and it was straight out of a horror movie – everything left behind perfectly untouched. The photos were absolutely bonkers, some of the most emotive and decisive portraits, and action scenes I’ve ever seen of the staff and some students – really beautiful photographs.”- Pia Paulina Guilmoth