97 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 and teasing apart the layers of natural history and human occupation on the shoreline. It is important to me to identify them 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, and I give it the same attention as other occupants of the shore. I've also noticed systemic changes associated with climate change - the warming water of the Gulf of Maine, invasive species on land and sea, unpredictable weather patterns. The still life process is a method of articulating my curiosity about the things I find, making a record of them, and documenting my growing understanding of the intertidal zone.
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.
97 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 and teasing apart the layers of natural history and human occupation on the shoreline. It is important to me to identify them 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, and I give it the same attention as other occupants of the shore. I've also noticed systemic changes associated with climate change - the warming water of the Gulf of Maine, invasive species on land and sea, unpredictable weather patterns. The still life process is a method of articulating my curiosity about the things I find, making a record of them, and documenting my growing understanding of the intertidal zone. 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.
13 images
28 imagesCelebrating recent bans on single-use plastic bags and their impending extinction. May they become weird ephemera that perplex future archaelogists. Cyanotype is a 19th century photographic process in which paper is coated with a UV-sensitive solution of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, then exposed to sunlight. For these images the bags are set directly on the paper, so each image is one-of-a-kind.
