In the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, where Maryland waters idly slip into Virginia, time stands still on the remote archipelago of Tangier Island. An hour’s ferry ride from the mainland, there are no cars, no hospital, two churches, one schoolhouse, and limited cell phone service, where voices still lilt with the hint of an English brogue.

It’s a place so small—shrinking more and more each year in part to climate change—you can almost see across it, and when visitors arrive, some can’t help but feel a sense of voyeurism, having ventured out so far to set eyes on this bygone way of life, which might actually disappear in the next half century.

Not Jay Fleming, though. Wearing a pastel sun shirt, Under Armour sneakers, and polarized sunglasses, he whips up to the Tangier pier on a borrowed golf cart and shoots the breeze with a pair of locals picking leftover crabs on their lunch break. The 34-year-old Annapolis photographer with some 10,000 book sales and 18,000 Instagram followers is somehow not an outsider here.

“He calls me ‘shithead,’” says Fleming with a boyish grin, nodding to an old timer at the oil shop before peeling off to grab his gear and head north to nearby Smith Island. His boat—a sleek gray Privateer with a 200-horsepower Suzuki motor—is meant to cut through the capricious waters of this widest part of the Chesapeake, and coming here for more than a decade, he now knows the channels, shallows, and tides, plus the best spots for finding arrowheads and foraging wild asparagus. After weeks between the islands, though, he’s now eager to get home, having just wrapped a string of six workshops and the final photographs for his upcoming book, Island Life.

“I haven’t driven a car in a month,” says Fleming, his skin tan and dark curls tangled as he steers into the wind toward the Maryland line. “Smith Islanders call this my peeler run”—comparing his recent work hustle to the waterman’s shoulder season of soft-crab harvests—“I’ve made some real friends here.”

This place, these people, the water. It is all peak Jay Fleming. A rightful heir in the lineage of iconic Chesapeake Bay photographers—A. Aubrey Bodine, Marion E. Warren, Robert de Gast, David Harp—he has spent the past decade gaining a loyal following for his visual storytelling that offers windows into the nation’s largest estuary that even many lifelong residents have never seen: underwater terrapins, newborn egrets, shedding blue crabs. Moonlit lighthouses, Bay Bridge sunrises, a haunting series on the last house of Holland Island. Now, as his time on Smith and Tangier shows, his bread-and-butter is the people of the Chesapeake.

“I’m not reinventing the wheel, people have done what I’ve done before,” says Fleming. “But rather than carry a torch, I’m trying to find a way to make my own work stand out.”

His work—low to the water, soft light, vibrant colors, strong reflections—has become almost instantly recognizable, and in part that is because of his commitment to capturing the image by any means necessary—on land, underwater, by kayak, in airplanes, through storms, before sunrise, even neck-deep in pound nets full of menhaden.

This aquatic comfort zone makes sense once you learn about Fleming’s upbringing. Growing up between Annapolis and Lewes, Delaware, he has been a lifelong river rat, swimming and fishing and boating as far back as he can remember, with his own kayak at the age of 15 scratching a growing itch to explore the water further. On evenings and weekends, he’d head out with rolls of film and a hand-me-down Nikon from his father, Kevin, an award-winning photographer for National Geographic, who also had an affinity for the great outdoors.

“. . . RATHER THAN CARRY A TORCH, I’M TRYING TO FIND A WAY TO MAKE MY OWN WORK STAND OUT.”

Equal credit goes to his mother, Carla, a director for the Department of Natural Resources, where Fleming interned in high school. After graduating with an economics degree from St. Mary’s College—“I was going to be a biology major but almost failed my first semester”—and a stint with the National Park Service at Yellowstone where he ran a gillnetting boat to catch invasive lake trout, he landed back at the DNR in seafood marketing. Here, he helped launch the “True Blue” program to promote local sourcing and got inspired with the idea for his first book.

“And the rest is recent history,” he says, now shooting on a digital Nikon D850.

But for three years, Fleming shadowed watermen and captured hundreds of thousands of photographs to create Working the Water, a photojournalistic narrative of the people—from watermen to crab pickers to boat builders—who make their livelihoods on the Chesapeake. Since its self-publication in 2016, it has become a coffee table staple around the watershed, initially selling out in its first 40 days and now in its fourth printing.

Those watermen, in particular, have become a niche for Fleming, and their notoriously cautious communities have largely welcomed him with open arms. He has been invited to birthday parties and church services, taken the local preacher out snorkeling, and often eats seafood with the family of Mary Ada Marshall, his sort of unofficial godmother and the high priestess of Smith Island cakes, whom he also hires to teach his workshop students—mostly amateur photographers—how to make the classic dessert. Many wear the honor of being featured in a Jay Fleming photograph like a badge, with his images framed in households, displayed at funerals, and used at farmers market stands to help sell their fresh-caught fish.

“Catchin’ red drum out here!” calls out local crabber Allen Marsh, looking up from his docked workboat on Smith Island’s tiny hamlet of Ewell as Fleming ambles in alongside him just before sunset.

“Any big ones?” asks Fleming, who has grabbed his own fishing rod in hopes of an evening catch.

“About 10 pounds,” says Marsh, before turning back to the work at hand.

The next morning, Fleming will shadow Marsh’s soft crab harvest, as he has many times before, seamlessly maneuvering around the long iron chain of the scraping dredge with barely a ripple, just another fish in the water as he sets his boat in neutral and slides between the bow and stern to get his shots.

“When Jay shows up, there’s low tides and no crabs,” cracks Marsh as he sifts through his haul for market-size soft-shells, finding a few keepers.

“People have this preconceived notion that watermen are tough to get along with, and I don’t think that’s the case—as long as you don’t demonize what they do,” says Fleming. “I don’t have a political agenda or an environmental agenda. I just show things as I see them. I hope my work can be an educational tool and help people make their own opinions.”

Of course, given his public following and proximity to the water, it would be easy for Fleming to become a voice for either of these Chesapeake stakeholders—the watermen or the environmentalists—particularly as the two parties continue to quarrel over the management of the bay’s natural resources, and while the estuary’s overall health continues to ail, receiving a “C” on its latest annual report card by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

“The bay is in trouble and humans are the cause of it,” says Fleming, “but I’m just a fly on the wall.”

Still, it was these undeniable changes that brought him down to the islands in the first place, drawn by a Facebook post featuring pictures of old headstones washing away on the now-abandoned Tangier “Uppards.” He arrived with his kayak via the mainland mailboat, paddled north to this spit of marsh, and camped out overnight to capture the drowning cemetery at low tide.

“I DON’T HAVE A POLITICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL AGENDA. I JUST SHOW THINGS AS I SEE THEM.”

“Maybe I have a knack for photographing things that are on the edge,” says Fleming, pointing to the images in Island Life, a visual narrative over a decade in the making of these last two inhabited off-shore islands. “I hate to say it, but these photographs will be historical in 50 years. An inventory of what’s here now.”

Which is in part what keeps him out here, on the water—this idea of documenting the way things were. At some point, he would like to create a series on issues the Chesapeake faces, such as pollution: “You’d be amazed at how many balloons you find out here,” he says. Or invasive species: “Blue catfish are a big threat to the ecology of the bay.”

For now, he’s all packed up and headed back to his car in Crisfield—his boat’s hull full of backpacks, camera cases, and a single, safely secured Smith Island cake—navigating the swells of northeast wind gusts, soaking wet by the time he reaches shore. This weekend, he’ll make his way down to Chincoteague, Virginia, for two more workshops, then get to work on final proofs for his new book.

“Every day is different,” says Fleming. “It’s definitely better than sitting behind a desk.”

Back in his office in Stevensville, a salon wall of framed photographs showcases his own work, plus magazine covers, pictures with Governor Hogan and Senator Van Hollen, and a candid shot alongside Art Daniels, the late Deal Island skipjack captain and first waterman to take Fleming under his wing.

Shelves of vintage cameras and oyster cans mingle with boxes of his dad’s old slides, while a massive Epson printer inches out images to be framed and hung in homes, offices, and restaurants like the True Chesapeake Oyster Co. in Baltimore.

Island Life will hit stores in October, but on this July afternoon, red pen marks dot a draft of its 280 pages, with Fleming having spent the weeks after his return from the islands sifting through images, writing captions, and taking the occasional nap. Come fall, he’ll host book signings and museum exhibitions, with most of the word spread through social media, where, even in a sea of images, his followers only continue to grow.

“Facebook and Instagram have been such incredible tools to reach people,” says Fleming. “I can run my social media from my boat.”

He relishes that freedom, the ability to be his own boss and dictate his own schedule—following the weather or harvests or next whim of inspiration, which doesn’t seem to be drying up anytime soon. This month, he’ll visit Maine to shadow lobstermen for his next book on the fisheries of the Atlantic Coast. But these local waters will still always be home.

“There are so many ways to tell a story here,” says Fleming. “I’ve been able to see so many things I wouldn’t have otherwise, and it’s given me a better understanding of the Chesapeake Bay. But anybody could do what I do, really. You just have to go out there and see it.”

FOWL PLAY

More than two years ago, 13 bald eagles were found dead on an Eastern Shore farm, leaving investigators puzzled as to the cause. According to a recent federal lab report, at least six birds had ingested carbofuran, a highly toxic pesticide that is lethal to birds and banned from the U.S. market.

Carbofuran was said to have been the primary cause of eagle death in the late 1980s, leading to their designation as an endangered species and causing the EPA to ban its granular form in the mid-1990s, followed by its liquid form in 2009. In the past, farmers have received fines for using the substance to kill nuisance animals in an effort to their livestock as they inadvertently killed eagles and other birds of prey that fed on the carcasses. Some within the illegal marijuana industry have also used the substance as a rodenticide. In the case of the Maryland deaths, the source of the carbofuran is still unknown, though most of the birds had recently ingested raccoon, which itself might have been poisoned. As federally protected wildlife, killing one bald eagle is punishable by up to two years in prison and a fine of $250,000 in the United States.

Once almost extinct, bald eagles are considered one of the greatest conservation success stories, having made a major comeback since the 1980s. The Chesapeake Bay region is home to the largest concentration of bald eagles in the lower 48 states.

BAY COMEBACK
For the first time in 33 years, the Chesapeake Bay’s health has shown signs of improvement in every region. In mid-June, officials from Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., announced that the estuary is headed towards a full recovery despite its overall grade remains a C, due to particularly troubled areas like the Patuxent, Patapsco, and York rivers. Seven out of 15 regions have shown significantly improved health, while none declined. Officials and scientists have awarded credit to the 15-year, $19-billion restoration plan mandated by the Obama administration in 2010 and administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, in which watershed states—also including Delaware, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York—have agreed to decrease farm runoff and improve wastewater treatment facilities, among other efforts, by 2025. The Trump administration has cut the plan’s funding by 90 percent in 2019, but state support for the initiative remains strong.

CRAB CRISIS CONTINUES
This spring, U.S. immigrant worker visas were awarded by lottery for the first time, compared to a previous first-come, first-served system, leaving Maryland’s seafood industry with a drought of seasonal workers who primarily hail from Mexico. In early June, following an outcry from local seafood businesses and a request from Gov. Hogan, U.S. immigration officials approved additional visas for one of Maryland’s multiple crab picking houses, which are said to be missing an estimated 35 percent of their summer workforce. Industry experts say this new strategy and its subsequent visa shortage puts the fate of Maryland crab houses in a dangerous position. As previously reported, it could also lead to an increased price for picked meat, due to a decreased supply, doubled with a decreased price for steamed crabs, due to a surplus of hard shells that would have otherwise been picked.

CONTESTED CLEANUP
In May, Maryland environmental regulators required the owner of the Conowingo Dam to increase its efforts to reduce pollution that flows from the Susquehanna River into the Chesapeake Bay. In response, the company, Exelon Corporation, filed two lawsuits against the state in June, stating that it shouldn’t be held responsible for abating all of the trash and excess nutrients (including nitrogen and phosphorus, which reduce clarity, cause algae blooms, and decrease oxygen levels in local waters) that build up at the end of the 464-mile river. The Susquehanna is considered the primary source of nutrient pollution in the main portion of the Chesapeake Bay, and this spring, above-average rains carried more than 85 million pounds of nitrogen from its waterway into the bay. With the dam at full capacity, local environmentalists fear that this refusal threatens the progress of the estuary’s multi-state restoration strategy.

ALL THAT TRASH

Maryland residents are throwing too much trash into their recycling containers, with as much as one third of those materials now ending up in a landfill or incinerator. According to a recent Sun report, this “aspirational recycling” or “wishcycling” practice—aka throwing unrecyclable goods in with your recyclable cardboard, plastic, and glass—is causing the worth of Baltimore recycling to decrease, as a ton of local recycling was sold for $112 in 2011 compared to $33 today, while also costing the city money to process and get rid it. Recycling education resources are available for city and county residents.

AIR APPARENT
Baltimore is considered one of the 10 worst U.S. cities for air quality, according to a new study issued by the Environment Maryland Research & Policy Center. In 2016, about 2.8 million people in the Baltimore region experience 114 days in which at least half of air quality monitoring stations measured “moderate” or worse for elevated ozone and/or particulate levels, which can increase the risk of negative health impacts, from coughing, wheezing, and asthma to congestive heart failure. Despite its notoriously bad traffic, the Washington, D.C., Arlington, and Alexandria area had fewer days of elevated air pollution than Baltimore, Columbia, and Towson.

Clean Air Partners, a new public-private partnership in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., has recently launched a summer-long “Breathe Easy” campaign to increase awareness about the effect of air quality on public health. Their recommendations include using public transit or carpooling, turning off electronics when not in use, cleaning HVA filters each month, and using a gas or electric grill in place of charcoal. They also offer a Clean Air Partners app to track daily air quality levels in and around Baltimore.