The World Is His Oyster

Celebrity photographer Tim Devine reinvents himself as an oyster farmer.

- Jim Meyer

Step into the walk-in fridge at the world headquarters of Barren Island Oysters—a single-story concrete shack on Hoopers Island—and owner and founder Tim Devine’s goal of growing the best oysters in the world doesn’t seem so far-fetched. In fact, it seems like he might be onto something. On three sides of the arctic-air cupboard, oysters are stacked head high, and their smell suggests the essence of the bay—the cold, clean heart of the Chesapeake.

Devine—a lean, tan, 40-year-old, wearing for-the-momentclean waders and boots—also seems born of the Chesapeake’s brackish waters, like some hack writer’s dream of the ideal waterman. He grew up in nearby Easton; he sailed on the Chesapeake Bay as a kid; and he walks with the carriage of a man who knows he belongs here. But the road he traveled to oystering was far longer than the 40 miles between Easton and Hoopers Island.

After high school, Devine went off to Georgetown University, from which he graduated in 2001 with a degree in classics. But as his final semester there wound down, he asked himself a very important question: “What the hell am I going to do with my degree?” In that final semester, he took a photography class and decided to run with it. So he left D.C. for New York, where he showed up at the studio of famed Time portrait photographer Gregory Heisler, then basically hung around until Heisler had no choice but to give him an apprenticeship.