My favorite beach on earth is on the north side of Coney Island, facing the Verrazano Bridge.
Where else can you find a perfect stretch of glittering sand, ideal for launching a boat,
just yards away from the greatest junk pile ever.
Susannah Ray has always photographed the water, but after Hurricane Sandy, the city shoreline and people around it became her singular obsession.
The tittle for her project A Further Shore, refers to the reaches of the New York City, but also to how the city looks from out here.
Catherene Despont is a writer, editor of Intercourse Magazine, and co-director of education at Pioneer Works in Red Hook.
She is working on a novel about an island in France, structured around it’s circumambulation.
On the 4th of July, she walked the length of Manhattan and all the way to Brooklyn, a ten hour journey that ended in fireworks.
I told her the next time she makes a trip like that, we should cross the river by boat instead of a bridge.
We floated past some of the iconic Coney Island Creek sights,
and saw how things had moved around during Sandy.
Because of its low bank, the creek flooded into Gravesend Bay and the Coney Island neighborhoods during the hurricane.
City officials used the term ‘backdoor flooding’, as though the creek was somehow in the wrong place,
rather than the infrastructure.
Susannah has photographed this area before from land,
but now we saw things that are invisible from shore.
An NYPD skywatch tower spied us as we paddled close to a new construction site,
and we waved to the construction workers up above.
Could there really be no windows looking out at the water in this new building, we wondered.
Everything here seems to turn its back to the water.
As we looked up at the Belt Parkway, Susannah realized that this was a spot she always saw from the road.
“This is where I always wanted to be!” she said.
On the way back, Catherine and Susannah talked about the difference between digital and film photography.
Digital works ok for getting into the action, they agreed, but film does more.
Instead of capturing the moment, it makes one. They said it has to do with handing over some agency to the machine.
“Do you have good conversations when you are out in the boat?” asked Catherine.
“The best.” Â I said. “I think because we are all facing the same direction.”
I wonder now if the boat is like a film camera, demanding its own agency to creat a new moment.
It also helps to be held captive for a certain amount of time.
A few days later, Susannah scanned her negatives and sent us some images (like this one). I suddenly understood what they were saying about letting the machine take over.
The film camera seems uncanily attracted to the right moment, and shows things that we didn’t even notice at the time.
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