The following blogpost was part of a long-term content marketing effort aimed at growing an organic audience for a photography app. This was part of a series of feature articles on photographers.

In the far reaches of Southwestern Alaska is Graveyard Point, named after the small cemetery eroding at the point’s edge into Bristol Bay. Old coffins buried at the Point wash out with the soil, scattering the bones of fishermen across the coast and inviting their living counterparts to remember that their occupation is as timeless as it is fragile.

Photographer Corey Arnold is one of those fishermen, documenting his annual pilgrimage to capture one of nature’s great rituals, slated to become the latest victim of habitat destruction due to planned mining operations nearby. “The photographs are a visual journal of my experience living here,” Corey explains. The Point is an ecological intersection where five rivers empty into a bay, creating a bottleneck for the annual summer salmon run and attracting swaths of grizzlies in pursuit of an easy meal. The fishermen follow their lead in a tradition that is as much about the salmon as it is about their connection to the Point and to each other.

When the season kicks off in June, Corey joins over one hundred men and women, grinding through twenty-hour shifts while sheltering in the derelict dormitories of an abandoned salmon cannery. In Corey’s photographs, we meet a range of personalities, from hard-nosed anglers to eccentrics in pink feathered caps. This life is not for the faint of heart. While it is true that skilled individuals can build small fortunes at the Point, there are easier ways to earn a paycheck. As Corey says, “You have to love it.”

Since he started fishing at the age of two, Corey has always known exactly what he wanted to be. As a kid, he dressed as a fisherman for Halloween before finally suiting up for the real thing. Somewhere along the way, his father placed a camera in his hands and Corey reeled in a college degree in photography. These twin passions commingled to produce Corey’s stunning images of life at the Point. From heroic portraits of GORE-TEX clad veterans wrestling nets of salmon from the surf, to the miraculous intrusions of curious foxes dropping in to investigate the eclectic interlopers, Corey reveals the secrets of his Alaskan Eden, bathed in its pale Northern light.

“[The Mine’s] toxic tailings, if built, could eventually decimate the wild salmon population forever.”

Behind his photographs, Corey is motivated by activism to save the Point from a planned mining operation, the result of recently discovered gold and copper deposits. “Graveyard [Point] is a very unique and special community of characters whose future is threatened,” he explains. “[The Mine’s] toxic tailings, if built, could eventually decimate the wild salmon population forever.”

By paddling us into the mystical waters of Bristol Bay, Corey transforms the mine’s faceless industrial venture into a social decision with real stakes–the prospect of losing something as timeless as the annual salmon run in pursuit of short-term profit. Ever the angler, Corey baits us into loving the Point as much as he does, and challenges us to reevaluate how we weigh the value of gold against a true national treasure.

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