Same day, same beach

Why am I still here?
Jensen Beach, FL
December 2017
This photo originally shared on Instagram

I must have hundreds of variations of this photo in my archives, different views of waves crashing on a beach, the water tracing impossibly lovely, temporary sculptures in the roiled air. The next wave will craft an entirely new set, so detailed you can almost feel their texture on-screen. But they won't be the same.

It takes 1/1,600 of a second to shoot this, a sliver of time before the sun dips below the horizon and the few wanderers on this largely empty beach disappear for the night. The surf is so turbulent I don't dare get too close, so I stand far back and use my lens to reach deep into the zone where waves go to die, working quickly before the shadows take over.

I don't come from a photographic family, no shoeboxes of faded snaps from my childhood, captured by parents who felt the storytelling weight on their shoulders. A vacation album might have included one wide-angle view of a beach, beyond which it simply wasn't worth wasting additional film on something that had already been recorded. This is is partly due to the expense of film and developing - we live in a different digital age now - but it is also due to a very different interpretation of what a picture stands for.

This photo is the story of us, of what it felt like to he here, and what we might have learned in the process. It is the story that my children will carry with them when I'm not around to tell it. In telling this story, I believe we turn vacations, journeys, or even trips to the grocery store into something richer, something tangible worth remembering, worth holding onto.

It's why I continue to share slightly different versions of the same scene, seemingly to the point of over-repetition. Because it's those subtle nuances and shifts that set us apart from all the other people on the beach who stare into the tumbling waters and hopefully tell their own stories. I'd hate to think I'm the only one out there doing this.

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