Florida Beaches and Coastlines

Over the past three years I have been involved in photographing the landscape around Florida. I regard any landscape more as a surface structure of our planet regardless of a specific geographical area. I find that it is of very little importance to the land itself whether one calls it Florida, Michigan, or any other area of humanly defined border. At best one might define a specific location via coordinates of latitude and longitude much the same way it is done amongst mariners or pilots.

When I began I was simply interested in making good pictures of my immediate environment. Later, as the work developed into a more complex and intentional series I became aware that I would often contemplate the idea of living at the edge as it were. It is worth noting that Florida’s coastlines change as dramatically as mountain ranges of the western United States. One can travel from Volusia County north to Flagler County and encounter a completely different landscape within a distance of only about 40 miles (see Ponce Inlet and Washington Oaks).

There is not much admiration on my part for the way the land has been treated by humans, particularly by western civilization (the Eskimos, for example, call western people with a mixture of incredulity and apprehension "the people who change nature..."); I cannot help feeling a certain impression in the presence of nature. One cannot come in contact with it, without realizing that it is greater than oneself.

Then there were the storms of 2004. Beaches and coastlines were dramatically changed forever in some instances. Beach erosion has been a primary concern of residents and politicians alike. Large sums of money were spent on rebuilding beaches in Volusia County and in Flagler County, as well. Yet, the sensation of infinite space which surrounds one, of an infinite time which has preceded and will follow the present moment, and of forces infinitely superior to those of which we are master, cannot fail, as it seems, to awaken the idea that outside of us there exists an infinite power upon which we must depend and which we will never be able to evade completely. It is this idea that enters as an essential element into my conception of the landscape as something divine.

The digital camera has proved crucial to my style of photography, which incorporates a delicate balance of description and prescription. The pictures are not to reflect any absoluteness of knowing, but rather an intuitive, intimate notion of the connection and interdependence of all things. My purpose then is to explore my own relationship to the land as well as the relationship that others have towards it.