Beaches

This week I spent a few days in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. It’s the only piece of ocean I remember going to as a kid, while living in rural, working-class towns in southern NH. I also skipped a lot of school to hang out there as a teenager. I was pleasantly surprised during my visit this week to see that not much has changed (I know, when do I ever say I’m happy that nothing has changed? Who am I?) And I found myself not only shooting, but planning for more and thinking about the long-term. I would love to spend more time photographing there, and realized my thoughts and motivation were mainly driven by the idea of documenting the place and the people who populate it. I am fascinated by the fact that places I used to hang out at are still there, that you can still play many arcade games for a quarter (there are hardly any new games, actually), and that the social/economic class of people who go to Hampton Beach for either a day or a week, has pretty much remained the same, despite the fact that this is one of the few vacation spots I know of where most of the inhabitants are affected by the economy. I wonder if this will change, and if so how long it will take. Will it be slow? Will it happen quickly, with a few large land sales or condo developments? What will the social landscape look like 5 years from now?

These are all questions I need to answer through photographing. I think this might be a new personal project of mine. I’ve struggled with how to show a location changing through images before, and this might be what I need to tackle that head-on.

By the way, here’s an image I took at Revere Beach in 2007, an oceanfront that has changed a lot in recent years.