Evidence of the Ocean
2024 Julia Margaret Cameron Award, Honorable Mention
I’ve been a summer person on the island of Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Cape Cod every year since 1986. My family and I stay in the town of Chilmark on a dirt road overlooking a sheep farm with a view of the ocean.
Chilmark is a place of natural beauty and rolling fields. Horses grazing in green pastures, an abandoned rusty windmill, tree branches tied naturally into intricate knots, dune grass reflected in pristine ponds and inlets.
Over the years, the ocean leaves its mark. Clay cliffs change shape, coastlines reinvent themselves. But images of the ocean itself remain virtually unchanged over generations, as though time has refused to halt.
As a photographer, this summer I felt conscious of the ocean in unexpected places, boundless but elusive. I decided to document her presence without showing her face. To show evidence of her influence in the most natural of ways — in the weathered wood of a door frame, the rust on a lamp, a lush pasture alive with horses, a garland of sea grapes washed up on the shore — environments in which time occasionally seems to stop. Thoughts of the ocean were everywhere and nowhere, guiding every shot. The images found me as much as I found them.
