Before relocating to the San Francisco Bay area, I lived for many years in the southernmost county of New Jersey, a largely rural, flat, coastal area that is almost sixty percent water and home to the City of Cape May, the country’s oldest seaside resort.  As such, the region is a nexus of heritage tourism, fragile ecosystems, weekend trophy homes, and remnants of the county’s early roots as a maritime and farming colony.  

I had always been drawn to the peculiar seasonal pulse of the coast, which varied daily as the summer crowds deserted the beaches at twilight and seasonally as winter encroached.  I came to see the shoreline as a vast stage punctuated by traces of human activity: the ordered pilings, decaying buildings and piers, dune fences, structural debris. and kitsch of a resort town.