New Work: Beach Days

Do you ever create something without knowing exactly why? You just have to do it and get it out of your system. That’s what happened with me and “Beach Days”. It didn’t become clear to me why I created them until I did some soul searching and journaling.

What really got me thinking was my husband saying that to him, they looked like a distant, unreachable utopia. At first I wasn’t too happy about that. No one likes to be reminded that something they want is out of reach.

But maybe he was on to something. There is a melancholic longing in the images and a wish for carefree days that sometimes seem to exist only in pictures. I shot them on one of those perfect beach days you wish could go on forever. But why did I create these images this way? I tried to dig deeper.

I realized that they are influenced by images I saw in my Grandparents’ house growing up. They used to travel quite a bit, and my Grandfather was an avid amateur photographer, so they had lots of images and photo albums everywhere. I used to love looking through them with my Grandmother while she was telling me the stories behind the photos. There were so many fun adventures and happy memories, and those slowly fading black and white images of glamorous locations and good times became emblematic of the kind of life I wanted to live as well.

Working on the photos later, I kept playing with them until they felt right. I didn’t know at that time WHY they felt right, but they did, and I stopped. Those were the final images.

This series started out with 12 prints, but in the end, these 3 are the only ones that have the exact feel I wanted.

EXCITING UPDATE! Beach Days No. 9 was featured in House Beautiful!

For more beach photography, see also Beach Days Part II