Fishworm: This photo book is about ‘dykes digging through trash’

For the past seven years, Pia Paulina Guilmoth and Jesse Bull Saffire have been scavenging photographs within a 60-mile orbit of their home in rural Maine. They’ve climbed through abandoned houses and dug through a politician’s discarded gay porn collection. They’ve hunted through yard sale leftovers and even discovered a junk shop beside the waterfall. Among their treasure is material both tender and grotesque, mundane and uncanny. Every image is then scanned on a beat-up Xerox machine they found in 2024, sitting in the rain outside the fire department that lives in the middle of their living room. The result is Fishworm, a photo book published by Void that rearranges a scrambled history of rural Maine and transforms it into a visual guide on the ephemeral condition of living.

Guilmoth and Saffire, who are also in a relationship, never planned to make a book. “It just kind of happened,” says Saffire. “We started Xeroxing the pictures, thinking we might make a zine or something. By the time we stopped to look at what we had, we’d scanned hundreds of images literally. We were like, ’yeah, OK, maybe this zine is getting out of hand!’ So at that point it turned into a book.” In contrast to the sea of heavily produced, tightly edited photobooks that dominate the market, Fishworm is a chaotic, irreverent vision of humanity born from multiple perspectives. The cast-off images – which range from 1940 to 2025 – were never asked to be preserved, yet somehow survived, offering a time capsule of a chapter of the world that feels further away every day. 

Zines have always played an essential part of Guilmoth’s work. “Before I knew about the high-end market of photo books, I was buying and selling $5 zines made at the library or FedEx,” says Guilmoth. “Fishworm was a way to return to those roots, spiritually. My work with a 4x5 is so slow, tedious, and unspontaneous, and I really have been missing the immediacy that I used to feel when working with small cameras, and not giving a fuck about how perfect the prints looked.” This resistance towards the tidy and formal feels powerful in an art world that often requires artists to work out how much of themselves they are willing to sell to succeed. For Guilmoth and Saffire, who affectionately describe Fishworm as “dykes digging through trash”, the answer is none at all.

Below, Pia Paulina Guilmoth and Jesse Bull Saffire speak to Dazed about zine culture, digging through a politician’s discarded gay porn collection and what it’s like living in rural Maine.

Hey, you two, what was the genesis of Fishworm? 

Pia Guilmoth: 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.

Where did you find the images?

PG: People’s trash piles, abandoned houses, yard sales, flea markets, so many places. 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.

Jesse Bull Saffire: One of my favourite scavenging experiences was at a yard sale at a state politician’s house, and when we told him we collect hunting and porno mags and stuff, he let us rummage through his whole shed. He had this absolutely magical collection of lesbian and femdom porn, including quality 80s BDSM stuff. Really transgressive and before its time, honestly. We had a real field day at that spot.

It feels like this scavenger hunt being local is important to you both.

PG: We scavenged everything for the book here and made it amidst the happenings of our daily lives: free time wandering around, late nights trespassing, falling in love, mental breakdowns, the whole nine yards. I guess just like everything I create, making work’s always happening in tandem with life. There’s never a break or distinction between me working and living. My life doesn’t afford me that separation for better or worse. 

You have love for Maine, but it’s also a hard place to be queer, right?

PG: It is isolating as hell. Being a trans woman becomes part of every waking moment, every decision, every move. I have a constant awareness of myself in relation to others. I think an important distinction to make, to anyone who’s ever travelled to Maine, this is not the mid-coast, not the tourist destination you hear about in the magazines. It isn’t a place filled with rich people’s second homes or transplants from New York. Our streets aren’t lined with coffee shops and pride flags. It’s a different state entirely. Fishworm is a revised history of our county, told without words or reason, through the eyes of two people who have chosen to remain in a place that often drives people like us away. Our experience living here probably comes through in the way we choose the photographs and what we choose to leave out. 

The book is significant, over 250 pages of chaos, beauty, debris and rituals. It’s a sensory overload, and every time I pick it up, I get a different experience.

PG: When I pick up a photo book, I never start at the beginning, nor do I flip through the pages in order. I wanted to make something that you could pick up, flip through for any amount of time, and set down for later. It feels like a phonebook. It’s like a directory to the county we live in, but each entry is a cryptic game of what? When? Where? Why?

JBS: We definitely wanted it to be something that would suck the viewer in. We intentionally put very little white space in there, so that you’d get this feeling of being really immersed in the scenes. Rather than feeling like an observer, we wanted to place the viewer right in the thick of it. The book is less about individual images and more about building this sensory experience that describes our experiences of living in this place. 

You two have collaborated before. How do you find working together as girlfriends?

PG: I’ve put Jesse in so many fun, weird, sometimes icky situations like making out with our friend in a mud bog filled with nasty little biting mudworms and pissing on me from a tree branch while I took a self-portrait. When we first met, we were always up until 2am sneaking into old houses and digging through the forgotten debris. For me, that is the sexiest, most romantic form of dating. 

Tell us about the title?

PG: We found this woman’s magazine from the 60s at a local yard sale, and there was a classified ad that read ‘earn money raising fishworms for us’, and then a phone number. I definitely would have taken the gig if I were around at the time.

JS: These magazines were also depressing! They included all of these ways to bring homemakers into the capitalist labour market with at-home money-making schemes. It reminded me of now, when we’re already working one full-time job, but it’s not enough to live on, so we also need side jobs on top of that. That was a theme throughout the book that I thought about a lot: the transition from more subsistence-based economies like logging and trapping to market economies and factory work, and the disorientation and loss that people must have felt in the process.

You describe the book as ‘dykes digging through trash’. Say more about this...

JS: That was a little inside joke that Pia and I had going. We were talking about how our book might get described as a ‘queer archival exploration’ or some academic jargon like that, but all those words actually mean is just dykes digging through trash.

One of the things that sucks about representation is that so often it’s the most privileged members of an oppressed community that get a voice – rich white cis queer people at elite institutions publishing theories and making art about queerness. And most of that is pretty useless to anyone outside of that bubble, for example, gay people who are literally just trying to live, pay rent and food, afford hormones, stay out of jail, not get killed, etcetera. 

Fishworm is published by Void and is available here now.