Provincetown Dune Shacks

Author's Comments

The first time I walked out to the dune shacks I underestimated everything. The distance, the sand, the wind, the sheer disorientation of a landscape that does not give you any reliable markers. You crest one dune and there is another, and another, and the shacks reveal themselves slowly, one weathered roofline at a time, half-buried in beach grass that moves constantly in the offshore wind. I keep my distance. These are private places in a way that matters - people are sometimes inside them, working, and the whole point of the shacks is that they have always been retreats from being seen. So I photograph from where I am, with a longer lens, and I let the landscape do most of the work. In late September the grass goes a particular shade of pale gold that holds light beautifully in the last hour before sunset, and a small grey shack against that grass against the deeper blue of the Atlantic in the distance is a photograph that does not need to be any closer than it is. The walk back is harder than the walk out. Plan for that. Bring more water than you think. The shacks have housed O'Neill and Kerouac and Mailer and a long list of others who came here to be unreachable, and something of that quality persists in the air around them. You feel it before you see anything. That is the photograph I am usually trying to make and rarely quite catching - the feeling of a place that has stayed itself by being difficult to get to.

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