COAST
Exposed and vulnerable, edges are where lines converge and tension dwells. These photographs dwell on one such edge, where the land yields to the vast, unrelenting force of the Pacific Ocean along the northwest coast of the United States.
This is a margin of raw confrontation. Facing the world’s broadest unbroken span of water and spared no mercy by protective inlets or barrier islands, this coast absorbs the full fury of winter. Gale-force winds lash the cliffs; rain hurls itself sideways through the air; surf explodes on the rocks; and waves, summoned from distant storms, rise up in swells more than twenty feet high. The violence is rhythmic and elemental—a pulse that shapes the very bones of the landscape.
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Yet from these punishing forces, a strange and fragile beauty is born. The wind sculpts the trees into krummholz—stooped, bent, and enduring. Towering sea stacks rise like Giacometti figures from the surf, solitary and spectral. Cliffs stand chiseled and resolute, and within the shelter of coastal forests, a lush, moss-draped silence gathers—cathedrals of green echoing with a deeper kind of stillness. Here, beauty is not gentle; it is hard-won, a delicacy born of resistance.
This elemental wilderness pushes back against our illusions of control. As Ken Kesey wrote in Sometimes a Great Notion, set along this very coast:
“The flora and fauna grew or died, flourished or failed, in complete disregard for man and his aims... a man might struggle and labor his lifelong life and make no mark! None! No permanent mark at all!” It is a land indifferent to us, and that indifference is both humbling and redemptive.
In these images, I hoped to conjure the wonder of discovery that struck me after stumbling out of the dark forest into the brilliance of the scene before me - the salt air lifting, revealing the last edge of the continent and the sea beyond in its full feral beauty. At a time when humanity’s footprint grows heavier with each passing year, this place resists. It endures. Shaped by forces immeasurably older and stronger than ourselves, it stands as a living testament to the wild—beautiful precisely because it remains beyond our reach.
