JEFFREY LOVE

BAY
When I resumed photography in the early part of the 21st century, among the first pictures I took were of Cape Cod Bay. At that time, I'd been going to the Cape for over twenty years and had spent many hours gazing at that horizon, mostly just trying to come to terms with how one goes about living on the planet. As I began to photograph again, it was a natural transition from contemplating to photographing that combination of sea and sky. It was a view that had previously soothed and inspired me, and it gradually became a photographic subject of endless variation and subtlety.

I'd been exposed to the beautiful work of Hiroshi Sugimoto early in my photographic development and I later learned he first began photographing water in 1977, the year I first visited Mexico. He made his first seascape pictures in 1980, the year I first saw Cape Cod. This sort of synchronicity seemed important somehow, but as someone educated in the Western approach to creativity, one that emphasizes the primacy of being original, I resisted taking these kinds of pictures for a number of years.

Gradually though, the pull of the air and water and light overcame my fussy quasi-sophistication, and I recognized that the pictures I reluctantly took were merely records of a deeply meaningful personal experience that I wanted to continue having. This realization liberated me from the arbitrary constraints of my learned artistic framework and gave me the self-permission to just take and relish these pictures as often as I liked.