WATERVILLE, Maine — Photojournalist Michael G. Seamans slipped away from a recent New Year’s Eve celebration between dinner and the ball drop to continue photographing a group of homeless people living on the banks of the Kennebec River.
He has been documenting their struggles since 2022. One person was finally moving into warm housing that night. Seamans didn’t want to miss the milestone moment.
It’s that kind of relentless dedication to documenting important stories have made Seamans Maine’s most lauded working photojournalist. Despite a recent string of accolades, Seamans now finds himself unemployed, thinking about moving into his car and struggling to keep a promise he made to his dying father at the start of his photojournalism career.
“I told him I’d commit myself to making the world a better place,” Seamans said this week, sitting in a Waterville apartment he said he can no longer afford. “That was the last conversation I had with him. But he never saw me accomplish anything.”
Seamans’ father died in 2006, just before his son started his first newspaper internship.
Since then, he has snagged countless Maine Press Association awards throughout the 13 years he worked here as a newspaper photographer. The National Press Photographers Association named him New England’s best photojournalist for six straight years from 2018 through 2023. The organization called him one of the best small-market shooters in the country.
Since 2015, the prestigious Pulitzer Center has awarded Seamans multiple grants allowing him to cover the ebola crisis in Africa, climate change in Labrador and the war in Ukraine — all on his vacation time away from what was his regular job as at the Morning Sentinel in Waterville.
Seamans didn’t always want to be a photojournalist. First, the Auburn native earned a degree in experiential education and focused on working with at-risk youths. Seamans also spent time working as a wildland firefighter on an initial attack crew in southwest Colorado.
It wasn’t until he came across the work of pioneering social justice photographers like Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lang that he became interested in what pictures could do to make the world a better place.
“Their pictures were a window into what was wrong with the world and how it could be fixed,” Seamans said. “I learned that photos can give voice to the voiceless without even using words. They show, rather than tell, and that’s always better.”
After studying photojournalism in Denver, Seamans lived in his car for six months while completing an unpaid internship at a Colorado newspaper. Not long afterward, he found himself back in Maine with a staff job at the Sentinel.
Like many Maine journalists, he wrestled with the feeling that his paper and state were too small to contain his more lofty ambitions. Covering high school sports, town meetings and housefires didn’t always feel like they lived up to the promise he’d made to his father. That’s when Seamans decided to start applying for grants that would let him cover global issues.
His first Pulitzer grant took him to Sierra Leone in spring 2015, where he covered what the ebola crisis was doing to women and children. It took him into hospitals, exposing him to nearly unbearable suffering. Returning to Maine that spring, Seamans found it hard to refocus on his regular, daily newspaper assignments.
“I remember covering the opening of a Little League baseball field, thinking I’d just seen other kids, about the same age in a Sierra Leone hospital, who were missing limbs from accidents while working in mines,” Seamans said. “It was really hard.”
He kept burning his vacation time on international projects. Seamans’ next grant took him to Labrador in 2019, where he followed Inuit seal hunters as they struggled with climate change and pollution generated by hydroelectric projects changing the landscape in their home territory.
After Russia invaded in 2022, the Pulitzer Center sent Seamans to Ukraine, where he documented the charity group Team Humanity’s efforts to evacuate women and children caught near the war zone.
“They were pulling orphans out of makeshift hospitals. Their parents were dead,” Seamans said of the harrowing work he witnessed and photographed.
Around the same time, Seamans discovered a group of unhoused people living beside the river, near his Waterville apartment. Befriending them, Seamans began making a series of striking photographs while they struggled to survive winter snow, spring floods and addiction.
Several of the photographs appeared in the Morning Sentinel, but Seamans shot most of them on his own, unpaid time. As time went on, balancing his uncompromising local and international photojournalistic ambitions with his day job became more and more difficult. It caused friction between Seamans and his supervisors. He and the paper parted ways last fall.
“It’s simple,” Seamans said. “I got fired.”
Seamans then headed back to Ukraine on his own dime, calling it “a place to get my head straight.” After a brief trip to Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip to document more of Team Humanity’s work, Seamans returned to Maine and covered the Lewiston mass shooting and recent unprecedented weather events here as a Boston Globe freelancer.
The work kept him financially afloat but is now tapering off. Facing next month’s $1,300 rent, Seamans isn’t sure what his next move will be. For now, he’s applying for more photographic grants and looking for additional freelance work.
Seamans knows one thing for sure. He’ll keep shooting. He promised his father.
“I’ll live in my car if I have to,” he said. “It’s paid for, and I’ve done it before.”
