Keeper’s Light

Standing inside the light at the top of a lighthouse, I photograph the sea through the same glass that has been casting light across it for centuries.

The glass is not a clean window. It refracts, reflects, and interferes. Sometimes the lighthouse light catches the surface and bleeds into the image. Sometimes light from outside bounces off adjacent panels and obscures the water entirely. The ocean is always there, but the glass decides how much of it you get to see. I'm not trying to see through it cleanly. I want that softening, that interference, the way it occasionally erases the line between sea and sky. What reaches the camera is not quite the ocean as it is, but a memory of it.

Every lighthouse has its own lantern room, its own glass, its own lens, its own view of the water. The place is not incidental to the image. It is the image. This work began in my hometown of Montauk, New York, at Land's End, where I first learned to surf and first picked up a camera. I intend to carry the practice to other lighthouses, but it started here, where both of those passions started, looking out at the same water that taught me to pay attention.

This project was a way of going back to the beginning, back to the most basic question photography asks: what does light do when it meets a surface? Inside the lantern room, surrounded by glass and ocean, the answer feels simple and inexhaustible.