Atlantic Coast

In 1954, American photographer Berenice Abbott set out to document the historic U.S. Route 1, which was becoming a vital north-south East Coast artery stretching from Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, Florida. Her anticipation of the seismic changes wrought by such a rapidly expanding Interstate Highway system -on small towns and major cities alike - has long become a reality. The increased reliance on private transportation along the Atlantic Coast has reshaped entire ecosystems, both rural and urban, and much of what she documented no longer exists.
Abbott took over 2,400 negatives and spent two years making prints and writing a prospectus describing the importance of the project: “to capture visually the character of a historic section of the United States, its beauties and incongruities and all. If visible evidence of the past survived, we wanted to photograph it before bulldozers and derricks moved in. ” Perhaps due to the vast scope of the subject or because it was overshadowed by another significant photographic road trip series, Robert Frank’s The Americans, 1958, Abbott never secured a publisher in her lifetime.

Inspired by Abbott’s acute and poetic observations of life along Route 1, my project, Atlantic Coast, seeks to undertake the same journey she did 70 years later, retracing the renowned photographer’s journey in reverse. Starting from my home state of Florida and ending in Maine, I will revisit the same communities and sites she documented, not just as an homage but as a means to reconsider the ongoing impact of this interstate highway and its symbolic ties to American expansionism. Once known as Pequot Path, King's Highway, and the Boston Post Road, U.S. Route 1 has paved the way for interstate commerce since its colonial roots as a mail delivery system.

My goal is to chronicle an American landscape forever changed by the unrelenting expansion of industry and commerce, to expose the myopic vision of real estate developers and the resulting displacement of people and wildlife. My prior bodies of work, created over the past seven years, have similarly examined landscapes through an environmental and social lens to reveal the gulf between glossy tourist images of place and the darker, fragile realities of life lived along the Eastern seaboard. Floridas, my book published in 2022, is a photographic exploration of Florida’s complex identity, juxtaposing the state’s mythic image of exotic beauty with its economic and social realities as a red state defined by xenophobia and immigration. By pairing my images with iconic works by Walker Evans, I examine themes of tourism, environmental degradation, and socioeconomic disparity. The project reflects on Florida as a place of beauty, conflict, and fragility, revealing how its landscapes and culture have been shaped by rapid development, climate change, and migration. In the Atlantic Coast project, I will not only significantly expand the geography of my reach but will document my journey in color as well.

Unlike Abbott, whose work in black-and-white documented a specific era of American life, my use of color references commercial tourist imagery as a means to address the construction of modernity, where the realm of artifice blurs the line between reality and illusion. The combination of color with my distinct approach of layering and juxtaposing images mirrors the fragmented, layered nature of contemporary life, where industries, people, and nature collide in ways that are both stark and nuanced.