Commercial Fisherman Chris Hamilton Captures Life on the Water

One can only imagine what kinds of things true men of the sea witness while out on the water, their livelihood dependent on making good catches – quite a different sight from the landlubbers seeing traffic lights, stop signs, strip malls and so on.

But Chris Hamilton, a lifelong Greenport resident and commercial fisherman, removed the need to imagine when he found a passion for photography aboard his father’s boat one morning.

“I found photography about 10 years ago or so, sort of by accident,” Hamilton tells Dan’s Papers. “I guess it was sort of a byproduct of my being out on the boat with my dad working and having an iPhone.”

Hamilton, 49, grew up in Greenport and went to college in Rhode Island. He returned home and worked a number of jobs, including as a landscaper, bartender and, of course, the family business.

“My dad’s got a trawler, a stern trawler, so we’re dragging nets,” Hamilton says. “And he’s done that his whole life. So he’s been doing it since the mid ’70s. He used to have a much bigger boat than what we have now. He used to have an old wooden shrimp trawler. I remember as a teenager going out on that with my dad, some of our earlier memories fishing with my dad. My brother used to love fishing with my dad. He did it a lot more than I did as a teenager.”

Hamilton and his father mostly sell their catches – the usual Long Island suspects of fluke, sea bass, striped bass, bluefish, porgies and more – to the Southold Fish Market, which works with a lot of the local East End seafood restaurants.

“I started fishing with my father again, I wouldn’t say full time, but a little bit more regularly, in 2010, due to unfortunate circumstances,” Hamilton says. “My brother passed in 2010. He had a landscape business and I had worked with him for about 10 years. I started spending more time with my family and started fishing with my dad again – we were healing together.

“I had an iPhone, so I started taking pictures of sunrises and the birds and the fish and just scenes from my daily life as a fisherman. Eventually, one thing led to another. I’m sharing photos on Facebook primarily at that point, and I started getting requests for prints and interest in my photography as art, which at that point in my life, was around 2012 probably.”

From there, Hamilton bought a camera, and started selling his photos in 2017. They’ve been warmly received for the view of his lifestyle they show, Hamilton says.

“Being a commercial fisherman on a trawler gives me a very unique perspective,” he says. “It’s not something that is widely viewed. It’s a pretty private lifestyle. It really was just being in the moment and kind of just realizing how lucky I was to spend some of those moments on the water with my dad. Fishing is hard, man; it’s a really hard way to make a living, especially these days. You’ve got to be really dedicated. There’s a reason why we do it, and it’s because it’s a beautiful lifestyle. You get to experience nature and in a real way that’s different from other types of work, being on the water. Water is probably the biggest inspiration for me in terms of my art.”

Going forward, Hamilton hopes to set up a store to sell prints of his photography in the future, but for now, he can be found in Greenport Village on the weekends, usually selling them in front of Lydia’s Antiques, weather permitting. His work is also on display at Bruce & Son on Main Street, The Shack in Southold and the North Fork Art Collective.

You can view some of Chris Hamilton’s photography at northforkartcollective.com/chris-hamilton. To purchase his photography or contact him, visit his Instagram page @northforkfisherman.