111 images
I live on an island off the coast of Maine, and I mess around on the shore all year round. For the last ten years I’ve been working on a series of still life photographs of things I pick up along the shoreline, photographed on an oversized light table in my studio.
Each photo in the Beachcombing series documents the things I found on a particular shore on a particular day: the title of each photo is the name of the beach and the date on which I found those objects.
These photographs are part of my methodology for studying the things I find. It is important to me to identify these things as specifically as possible - not just plants and animals, but rocks and marine debris. Over the years I’ve become more and more concerned with plastic trash and its effect on ocean ecosystems. I use this process to articulate my curiosity about the things I find, to keep a record of them, and to document my growing understanding of the intertidal zone, exploring the layers of natural history and human occupation on the shoreline.
As my familiarity with marine creatures, tides, geology, and wind patterns has grown, I find the compositions breaking out of the simple grids I began with and becoming more elaborate.
Some of the recent ones are positively baroque.
111 imagesI live on an island off the coast of Maine, and I mess around on the shore all year round. For the last ten years I’ve been working on a series of still life photographs of things I pick up along the shoreline, photographed on an oversized light table in my studio. Each photo in the Beachcombing series documents the things I found on a particular shore on a particular day: the title of each photo is the name of the beach and the date on which I found those objects. These photographs are part of my methodology for studying the things I find. It is important to me to identify these things as specifically as possible - not just plants and animals, but rocks and marine debris. Over the years I’ve become more and more concerned with plastic trash and its effect on ocean ecosystems. I use this process to articulate my curiosity about the things I find, to keep a record of them, and to document my growing understanding of the intertidal zone, exploring the layers of natural history and human occupation on the shoreline. As my familiarity with marine creatures, tides, geology, and wind patterns has grown, I find the compositions breaking out of the simple grids I began with and becoming more elaborate. Some of the recent ones are positively baroque.
7 images
28 imagesCelebrating recent bans on single-use plastic bags and their impending extinction. May these all become treasured relics. Scanned images of original cyanotypes. Prints ordered through the website will be C-prints of the scanned image. Please contact me if you are interested in purchasing the original.
