Last week, the photographer and commercial fisherman Corey Arnold posted photographs from Bristol Bay, in southwest Alaska, on the New Yorker photo department’s Instagram feed. For five weeks every summer, Arnold and other fishermen congregate in the region as tens of millions of sockeye salmon arrive to spawn. This year, Arnold told me, was one of the largest returns the fishermen had seen in decades. “The fish come in so thick, it’s hard to justify sleeping when you can catch so much every hour that you’re out there,” he said. Even during an ordinary summer, the men will often work for up to twenty hours a day. For Arnold, the most difficult part is transitioning between the physical demands of fishing and the creative mentality of photographing. “I’m balancing many variables of the fishing operation, and then I have to stop and think creatively; sometimes I wish I could just sit out a season and just photograph.”
All photographs by Corey Arnold.
