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Benches of Seaside Heights is photographed in Seaside Heights, NJ, a dilapidated coastal resort best known as the site of MTV’s ‘Jersey Shore’ TV show. Each summer, I candidly photograph the town’s visitors as they relax, eat, and make the best of a day at the beach. I intend to continue this series indefinitely, both as an exploration of human behavior, and a chronicle of Seaside’s visitors over time.
I’ve been going to Seaside since I was too little to walk. It was an uneasy place for a child. Cigarette smoke and the occasional fistfight poured out of stale-smelling bars. Playboy-themed chance games were right next to the childrens’ games I played, like the frog pop. I saw slogans on t-shirts that I did not understand, but somehow I understood that they were obscene. I found it very frightening. However, once I grew older, I started to appreciate Seaside in a different way. With its big fake stucco castle and a heavenly-smelling pizza joint on every block, it has a certain unpretentious charm. In the summertime, it draws in huge crowds - tens of thousands of people per week - that are, like the greater NYC metro region, very diverse, culturally, ethnically, and socioeconomically. It’s a vibrant visual and social landscape. Even though I, like most locals, grumble about the traffic and the noise, I take pride in seeing how much the town is enjoyed, how much diversity it draws in from the surrounding areas. I find it much more interesting than my own neighboring beach town, with its quiet shuffle of regular beachgoers.
On bright summer days, I walk up and down the mile-long boardwalk, and take at least one candid photo of every single occupied bench. I don’t stop to look, or think, or try to pick the right moment. I take a few snapshots very quickly, and move on. Whoever or whatever comes into the frame is essentially arbitrary. This approach allows me to amass a multitude of completely candid scenarios, showing - very simply - what existed and what was happening at the exact moment I walked by. I don’t know what I have captured until weeks or sometimes months later, when I see the images on my computer screen. Each image is a surprise, a sort of gift to open.
The majority of the people in my photos visit very briefly, for the day or weekend. While a few subjects have appeared in my camera day after day and year after year, most do not. When editing, I search for images that surprise me, or make me laugh, or somehow reflect the current zeitgeist - a slogan on a t-shirt, for instance. I notice things in the photos I could not possibly have seen as a passer-by - that a little boy is holding a set of white plastic vampire fangs, that a woman’s painted nails spell out “I miss 2019,” or that a wife is giving her husband a mean side-eye. Continuing this series into the future, I see it as a way to quantify the passage of time, to break it down into little parts and small details, and use those details to make observations about people and about society. These images not only entertain me, but also tell a story about my community and the larger world.