In 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit New York City and my family and I got a small glimpse of how the climate crisis will force change. We lived in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, a small neighborhood sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and a small bay of water. Our basement flooded, and salt water made its way into many, many family archives, but there was one photo album I hadn’t known about until I unearthed it seven years later in 2019. A year when the world was figuratively and literally on fire and the era we were living in was deemed the Anthropocene.
The photo album was really a folder that my dad had saved; a pile of black and white silver halide 4”x5” prints fused with their plastic sleeves on detached metal spines. The subject of the photos, were of my grandmother just a few years after surviving the Holocaust. In the photos, she is smiling on a beach, far from her coastal childhood home in Latvia. It struck me that generations of my family have gravitated to the sea to heal the wounds of displacement. The pictures’ content and environmentally altered surfaces generated connections for me between image and process, and called up notions of vulnerability and memory.
Now after years of living by the water, my family is looking to move away from the volatile and unpredictable coast in an effort to skirt the negative impacts of climate change. I returned to Manhattan Beach to make portraits of neighborhood youth. My grandmother’s stories ingrained in me a belief that teenagers have a singular sense of bravery and resilience, traits they will need to activate as they respond to the climate crisis.
The portraits in this series have been submerged in ocean water I collected from Manhattan Beach for the same length of time my family archives sat in our basement during the flood. Unlike the photographs of my grandmother, this deliberate gesture is an investigation of control--an act of preemptive grief built directly into the process of making the work.
