The salt marsh was familiar ground to me long before I began making photographs.
Along Cedar Run Dock Road, Great Bay Boulevard, and the back bays of southern New Jersey, I’ve returned through seasons, historic storms, changing tides, and from ordinary evenings to banger sunsets blazing across the sky. These so-called salt marshes are part of the wider Mid-Atlantic coastal landscape. A remarkable, if understated ecosystem where water, weather, vegetation, migratory wildlife come together in tension and in harmony with our very own human footprint.
The photographs collected here follow the quietest quintessential east coast landscape for over a decade. Sometimes recognizable, sometimes transformed by movement or light, these are places I know well but never completely.
I keep returning because familiarity has never exhausted what there is to see.
At Cedar Run Dock Road, grasses and turning channels give the marsh its structure beneath a broad summer sky.
A closer perspective among the grasses, where shallow focus changes how the marsh is seen.
Wind moves through the grasses as low sunlight picks out their seed heads and gestures.
The road enters the picture. Signs, wires, and pavement belong to this familiar marsh landscape, too.
Along Great Bay Boulevard, water and the remnants of human use share the landscape.
Water, land, and sky resolve into restrained tones along Great Bay Boulevard.
With the wind absent, the north marsh holds an unusually clear reflection of the evening sky.
A familiar building and the surrounding marsh hold their places beneath an unsettled sky. A narrow opening of sunset color changes the scene.