I am interested in exploring thresholds in my work, particularly those between human constructs and natural forms. This body of work explores the experience of searching through a series of ocean portraits shot in various locations across the East coast.
I view photography as a form of contact, of touch—light is inscribed into an emulsion and chemically imprinted. It is a way of holding on to time. I hope to bring a softness to the mundane and morbid through this contact. My process involves wandering and waiting. I use a 4x5 view camera for the level of detail I am able to capture on a large negative, allowing for both close and far looking.
These portraits are compositionally held together by a horizon line which separates the sky from the ocean. This line is sometimes pristine, sometimes partially obscured, or marred by a notation of distant cargo ship lights. The ocean’s tides are captured at varying intensities of form, sometimes crashing and sometimes murmuring. By making large scale prints in the orientation of a portrait, I encourage the viewer to intimately engage with the characteristics which distinguish each scene, despite the consistency of the subject matter. I have also flattened a space with infinite depth, bringing the furthest and nearest lines to the same level. Through these ocean portraits, I am also processing fundamental human loneliness and disconnection. Each scene, while lacking the human figure itself, contains traces of human industry at varying magnitudes. There is no point at which humans can be considered completely separate from our environment, and I examine our points of intersection through this body of work. The constant question that informs the series is the following: what are we searching for?