Artist Statement

The Salisbury Beach series is a portrait of weekend life at a small Massachusetts coastal summer ‘resort’ on the skids.   An ongoing project, begun in 1997 after studying with Mary Ellen Mark, I was motivated to create my first photo essay.

 Memory, a hunch, intuition led me Salisbury Beach, a place where in the 1950’s as teenagers we drove down Route 1, dressed in strapless netted gowns from Filene’s basement, our eyebrows highlighted with Vaseline, for ‘hot’ dates at the Frolics Nightclub. Fifty years later, the attraction for me was to work in a place where I could trace the changes over time and where nothing happens.

Salisbury Beach is not a picture postcard resort:  rather, it is an endangered place.  Located on the border between the Massachusetts and New Hampshire coastlines, with its eroding shores, it is dominated by the Seabrook NH Nuclear Power Plant to the north.

Season after season, on a summer’s Sunday afternoon, I roam this salty wilderness sharing a space of mutual anonymity. They do not come to be seen. There is no boardwalk of glamour. There is no parade of the latest summer beachwear ...no bathing beauty contests . . . not a point-and-shoot camera in sight.

As a photographer/explorer, I am pulled in by the irony of this fragile, weary oasis . . . this dead-end sandy strip . . .I am drawn to the paradoxical vulnerability and vitality of the ‘townies’ and day-trippers ... who come to the pizza palaces, clam huts, karaoke bars, and arcades ...who come for a ‘sea change’ ...to escape life’s daily little insults and injuries.

Their down-to-earth provincialism, boredom and playfulness, loneliness and tenderness beg for a memorial scrapbook.  My objective as an artist is to dig deep, revealing the hidden undercurrents of human nature and to document how the fickleness of timeand nature can so recklessly toss aside a sense of place. Soon, like cotton candy, the muted honkey tonk will disappear, consumed by condos.