Precarity and Shore is a meditation on an impending flood. It was made on the Long Beach Peninsula, a narrow strip of land just above sea level that juts out into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Washington state. The tide rises up to nearly touch roads and homes. The peninsula is in danger of being swallowed by the Pacific in a matter of decades.
I photographed a salt marsh on the bay and a drain-water creek running into the ocean from the same vantage points near dawn and dusk each day for a month. In doing this I observed how shifts of the tide’s cycle met with weather and light as the sun shifted through the month. By directing my attention toward coastal ephemera, I aim to soften my anthropocentric perspective and show the landscape as a complex subject which continually reveals itself.
In photographing the tide and the life around it, the tide became metanymous with future sea-level rise. It became impossible to study the tide without imagining water rising further to swallow the peninsula. In this sense, the images dwell both in the particularities of the shores each day, and in anxiety called up by the water.
