Lifeguard Stand, Rockaway Beach, Queens, New York
Photographed on an unusually foggy summer day, this lifeguard stand is a beacon of modern humanity with all its fluorescent colors, on a day that fades all but the brightest spectrum.
Lifeguard Stand, Rockaway Beach, Queens, New York 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?
