I live on an island off the coast of Maine, and I beachcomb all year round. In winter, I scramble awkwardly along icy beaches just off the main roads. In summer I range farther afield, poking around at the end of dead-end dirt roads, wading along the base of cliffs or picking my way cautiously over seaweed-covered rocks.
After fourteen years of roaming this island's beaches, I developed an obsession with photographing the things I find. The crisp white background and the precise arrangements contrast with the odd shapes and rough textures, both highlighting the individuality of each object and unifying them all into a larger composition.
The Beachcombing series is a stylized set of beach portraits. Each photo in the series documents the things I found on a particular beach on a particular day. It is an attempt to abstract a moment in time.
For other works, I bring together similar things found far away from one another, producing a photo of, for example, dozens of pieces of green sea glass or of sanddollars. These are meditations on the amazing variety of individuals within a group.
Beachcombing is fundamentally a treasure hunt, an emotional and old-fashioned form of exploration that depends on serendipity, suspense, and glee. Researching my finds can lead through marine biology, glass-making, history, geology, chemistry, climate, oceanography and other disciplines. The resulting photos look vaguely scientific, with echos of pressed botany specimens and Linnean classification diagrams. In a way they are. But where most scientific illustrations present answers, these photos are a way of articulating my questions.
You can see more of my work at www.jenniferbooher.com
