When I first began photographing bodies of water many years ago I was drawn to their beauty and mystery…the shifting light, the endless horizon, the sense of standing at a threshold between worlds. At that time, the images felt like meditations, private notes on place, stillness, and presence.
The project deepened during the COVID years, when I was forced to remain close to home and reengage with my archives. Those stored-away images became a way to grieve collective and individual losses and to process uncertainty. Immersing the photographs in seawater, allowing salt crystals to etch into their surfaces, mirrored the fragility of that moment. The sea itself became a collaborator, transforming the work from static documentation into something ephemeral, alchemical, and alive. As the series has unfolded my relationship to it has deepened. We are all tethered to water, through the tears we shed, the tides that rise and fall, the shared vulnerability of living on a planet where water is both life-giving and precarious. What began as an intuitive practice has become an exploration of how intimately we are bound to the natural world, revealing both fragility and resilience. My perspective has widened along with the work. Tiny Tears Fill an Ocean has grown beyond a single journey to embody the interconnectedness of all our journeys. It acknowledges that, though we may live vastly different lives and carry different losses, we all stand on the same shores, looking out over the same waters, asking the some of the same questions about who we are and how we endure.
Submerging prints in seawater extends this curiosity about photography as a living, luminous material; an image always in flux rather than fixed. As the water dries, salt crystals form, inscribing time, place, and matter into the photograph itself. The resulting images become fragile shorelines where creation and erosion converge. Salt interrupts smooth looking, asking viewers to move, to notice how light shifts across the surface hour by hour, how beauty and brittleness coexist. Because salt binds oceans and bodies, our sweat, our tears…the crystals also carry an embodied empathy, an echo of our shared salinity and the fragility of marine ecologies. In this way, the work holds space for what first drew me to photography: its capacity to hold the luminous and the vulnerable together, to make time, touch, and loss gently, materially present.
What compels me about working with the sea is its refusal to be only one thing. It is beauty and threat at once. When I submerge a photograph, the crystals that emerge shimmer with delicacy yet also mark erosions and scars, speaking to the slow transformations of our oceans. Holding these contradictions together feels essential. I do not want to lecture through the work but to invite viewers into a space where beauty and fragility coexist. I hope they also slow viewers long enough to sense the undertow of ecological precarity. It is less about illustrating catastrophe and more about cultivating awareness—a reminder that what we find most beautiful is also what we most stand to lose.