The Rest Goes Out with the Tide

Loss can move in both directions. We lose people, and we also lose the version of ourselves that existed with them. In Sealskin, Jeff Dworsky’s photographs sit in that space. They aren’t distant observations of someone else’s life; they are the life. His children grow. The seasons change. Work is done and undone. And then something shifts, a presence is gone, though the photographs never name it. We don’t know her reasons. The images only show one side, but that’s the nature of any personal record: it can’t contain every truth.

The work doesn’t try to resolve the absence. It doesn’t explain. It shows what can be shown, and leaves the rest unspoken. That’s the part I keep thinking about, the willingness to let a story remain incomplete. When a photographer is inside the life they’re documenting, there’s no such thing as neutrality. Every frame is a choice, and every choice carries the weight of knowing what was outside the frame.

Other photographers have worked in that same tension. Larry Sultan, photographing his parents, was not simply recording their lives; he was shaping the story of their relationship as he lived it. Sally Mann’s Immediate Family turned her home into both subject and setting, knowing that intimacy changes how a photograph reads. Nan Goldin placed herself and her friends inside a visual diary that was impossible to separate from her own existence.

Dworsky’s work shares that intimacy, but in a different register. It isn’t theatrical or confrontational. It feels steady, even when what it’s showing is change. That steadiness is deceptive. The absence is still there, shaping the edges of the images. You notice it in what’s missing, in the way the rhythm shifts from one part of the sequence to the next.

The selkie myth runs quietly alongside the photographs, not as a literal explanation but as a second voice. In the legend, the seal-woman returns to the sea. Here, the leaving is slower, more ordinary, and in some ways harder to see. Which is often how it happens in life, not a single break, but a gradual drift until you realize the shape of things has changed.

And that’s where the work lands for me. Photography, especially when it’s personal, is always partial. It can’t hold everything. It will never be the whole truth. But the fragments it does hold, the ones we choose to keep, are the truths we could carry at the time. The rest, inevitably, goes out with the tide.

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