Southwest Cove – 2009/2024

In August 2009, my wife rented us a vacation house on Owls Head island, a tiny spot of land connected by bridge to the rural settlement of Southwest Cove, on the Atlantic side of Nova Scotia. We went with three kids, a dog, and my 8x10 Kodak Master view camera. I had been making photos with the 8x10 for more than twenty years; despite its weight and labor-extensive process, it was my favorite camera. It was formal. It was exacting. It was serious. 

But I wasn’t making many pictures there in the woods of Canada. I had also taken along my first-generation iPhone, which I was using as a telephone, a music player, and to get email. It had a camera too, rudimentary, rough, and to a professional photographer, seriously unserious.  By our third day on the island, however, I’d started playing with it and an early app called Shake-It Photo, which emulated the look of a Polaroid SX-70. Compared to the complexity of my big Kodak, shooting with the iPhone was a liberation. For the rest of our vacation, I would go to the same places throughout the day, stand on the same rocks, and shoot the changing light and weather.  

When we returned home, I made a small book of the images, put it on a shelf, and soon forgot it. In the Fall of 2024, while working though my archive, I revisited those pictures. I was drawn to their innocent, ethereal quality—the abstraction of the landscape, the weird colors, and the scratchy “signal-to-noise” low-fidelity look. And I was pleased by the idea that I’d created them long before the iPhone had become the most popular photographic tool in the world. Seeing these photos again drove home the old truth that time has the last word in how we look at our work and, ultimately, how we understand our lives.