I continue to find myself drawn to two types of photography: documents of the mass of people who visit tourist spots, and explorations of our giant world that highlight the tininess of humans. J. Matt’s series At the Water’s Edge is a bit of both. Living and working principally in California, J. Matt is interested in “the intersections of history, public and private spaces, and the ways in which we have constructed the developed world around us.” His views of coastal locations show a special attention to places where the land meets the water, and have me thinking about what it means to enjoy a place as well as care for it.
From the artist’s statement: The coast is where politics was reputed to stop and a place which polite society once wrote off as an unredeemable and dangerous wilderness. Now one of the most politically contested and environmentally burdened regions on the earth, our coasts face rising sea levels, depleted resources and unsupportable population densities. As coastal resource use and access are debated in the public sphere, ordinary people travel to the coast for recreation in record numbers. How they interact with and understand what they find there is of incredible importance as all of humanity faces difficult questions about stewardship of the earth’s meteorological environment, oceans, and coastal regions.
From “At the Water’s Edge”
Visit artist's site: tinyshocks.com
Posted November 27th, 2017
