Surf School, Ocean Beach, San Francisco, CA
Photographed on a typically foggy day at Ocean Beach, a procession of brightly colored shapes emerge to reveal students of a surf school heading out after a morning session in the cold Pacific.
Surf School, Ocean Beach, San Francisco, CA is part of an ongoing series, Searching, photographed throughout recreational locations in America. Searching looks at our unexplainable desire to explore and travel in order to experience untouched terrain and beautiful vistas, revealing the importance of landscape and nature in our lives as well as the signs of modern civilization that get in the way. Where does this seemingly instinctual yearning to explore come from and why does experiencing nature make us happy anyway? Perhaps we gain pleasure from conquering the wilderness because it gives us a sense of achievement. This achievement, however, seems to be diminished by the ease in which we get there and perhaps the knowledge and evidence that so many others have been there already. Therefore, the very thing that allows us to so easily make these treks—infrastructure and modern technologies—robs us of at least some portion of the pleasure we seek. This leaves me to wonder: What are we looking for and how can we possibly find it?
