susannah-ray-right-coast

Image source: Susannah Ray

The NY Times published a beautiful series of photographs by Susannah Ray, a resident of the Rockaways and a surfer who learned to ride the waves there off the peninsula. There’s an option to view the photos in full screen and we recommend that. Accompanying the photos is also an essay about Ray, about simpler times past – like when she decided to take up surfing, and that she met her husband at a local bar (he’s also a surfer). Here are her thoughts on the photos, with the perspective of seeing her beloved community destroyed by Hurricane Sandy.

“There is something a little elegiac for me to look a those pictures,” she said last week, as plumbers fixed the heat and hot water systems in her home, which had flooded to the basement ceiling. “These photos were never intended to glorify surfing. Now they’re about saying this is another community that has been disrupted, maybe even irreparably damaged by the force of the waves. These pictures were a kind of love song to the Rockaways. Now, they’re almost like a dirge.”

Well, despite the dirge comment, these photos are wonderfully atmospheric and hearken back to what seems like a simpler time – concern about catching a wave, hanging out with your friends, and lounging under the boardwalk, most of which is gone now.

More photos in her Right Coast collection can be seen on her website.

Recalling the ‘Right Coast,’ Before the Storm [NYT]
Hurricane Sandy utterly destroyed the Rockaway boardwalk [QNYC]
Right Coast [Susannah Ray website]


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