The year is 1980. Two men meet from wildly different backgrounds. J.B. Riggs Parker is a Philadelphia lawyer and investment banker who has jumped out of the rat race to move to Martha’s Vineyard. Island native Donald Poole, closing in on his ninth decade, is continuing his lifelong pursuit of building the perfect round wooden lobster pot, in an age when plastic is taking over the industry. He plies his archaic craft in his weathered boathouse along the wharves of one of the country’s last intact, authentic fishing villages; we’re speaking, of course, of Menemsha.

Mr. Parker and Mr. Poole exchange pleasantries in son Everett Poole’s fish store. Before long a rare honor is conferred on the Philly washashore; he may drop around the boathouse any time for a visit. Amid wan winter light filtered through streaked, small-paned windows, and under warped walls slung with buckets, tools, tack, fishing line and a fresh new lobster pot nearing completion, the two men swap stories. Mr. Poole shoves gloves on his hands, slips a pipe in his mouth, and works wooden dowels snugly into place. Mr. Parker, with a Hasselblad camera in his hands, occasionally lifts the viewer with its Zeiss lens, and clicks a photo of the craftsman at work, a slight, benignant smile drawn back from his pipe stem.

A few years later, Mr. Parker was in the Bahamas when he received word that Donald Poole had died back in New England. Was it a shock to get the news? “It’s only a shock when a man as robust as Donald dies at all. You expect him to go on making his wooden pots — redesigning them, experimenting with them, forever,” he said in an interview this week.

After his blossoming friendship yielded the winter-long photo shoot at the Poole boathouse, Mr. Parker developed the negatives in his darkroom and kept them in archival sleeves for nearly three decades. A passion for photography that began in 1973 led him, Hasselblad in hand, to shoot abstracts, people, street scenes, shorelines and European cities. He had numerous shows and produced a book of photographs in the 1970s called Up Island Winter. And suddenly, in this past year, a still small voice encouraged Mr. Parker to remove the photos of the Menemsha lobsterman from storage.

“Nowadays I work with a hybrid method. I still take my pictures with film, develop the negatives in my dark room, then I scan them and print them out digitally. That way I maintain the incredible renderings from the lenses, but the printers are amazing,” he said.

He had before him 200 photographs of Donald Poole, in the boathouse and out on his fishing vessel, the Dorothy and Everett. He culled 40 of his favorites and took them around to the galleries. He received a great deal of interest from Jane Slater of the Chilmark Historic Society who also sat on the board of trustees at the library. She was adamant that the Poole collection should be shown in the bright airy space of the Chilmark Free Public Library.

When Mr. Parker, who also is busy as a hard-driving Chilmark selectman, asked where he plans to train his Zeiss lens next, he says he’s starting to think about closing in on Menemsha’s Little Lady, a side-dragger commercial fishing boat, long used for classic inshore fishing. Like the round wooden lobster pots, these small side-draggers have fallen out of style.

Nowadays inshore fish have been depleted, and bigger boats steam out for bigger hauls of fish. The Little Lady, now a bona fide antique, is beautifully preserved by the third generation of the Jason family of Chilmark. It also, smothered in snow, adorns the cover of Up Island Winter.

“We need to look back at what has worked in the past,” Mr. Parker reflected. “Often tools, methods, and people achieved more success in the past than new tools, methods and people achieve today.”

Gazing at these black and white photographs of the elder lobsterman in his snug boathouse and out trawling the Bight leaves us with the impression that some wonderful tools, methods and people are forever gone. But not, thanks to a Hasselblad camera and an Epson R2400 digital printer, forgotten.

All are welcome to join the J.B. Riggs Parker at an opening reception at the Chilmark Library on Saturday, August 15, from 3 to 5. The exhibition remains up until Sept. 10.