a portrait of santa cruz, part 1 - by the sea

This post is the first in a series. To see more Santa Cruz photos, click here.

RED BAT SENIOR THESIS

In the summer of 2011, just as I was making the decision to leave Red Bat Photography, we scored a sweet gig with the City of Santa Cruz: to create a portrait of the city, in photos. They said they planned to use these photos for a variety of purposes. We were given a list of locations to include in our portrait, and told we could use photos from our archives if that would make it easier.

I broke off from looking at wedding pictures and started trawling my hard drives. I had plenty of photos of Santa Cruz, having lived here since 2004; these were intertwined with my personal photos in meticulously organized databases that had been carefully named and color-coded and then unopened for vast stretches of time. The project sent me on an unexpected and highly sentimental journey through my history in this town. I remembered phases of my life vividly as I looked at scenes captured over the years. It felt strange to pick out photos with intense personal meaning and submit them for a professional project, yet I knew the personal meaning would not show. These are views that belong to everyone.

The portrait assignment was satisfying to complete, because it pulled together my photographic experiences at a time when I was pondering what the Red Bat adventure had meant to me. Red Bat had made these photos possible, by putting cameras and lenses into my hands that I wouldn't have been able to access otherwise, and by giving me a photo cohort (Patrick) whose images of Santa Cruz inspired me to make more of my own. I haven't included Patrick's photos from that assignment here, but I can assure you they were lovely. When I look at mine now, I remember how the two of us used to show our best Santa Cruz shots to each other and high-five over our awesomeness.

This assignment made me feel like I was taking a final test before graduating from my first professional photography business, and I appreciated the chance to review what I'd learned. If that sounds nerdy, well, it's because I am a nerd. Are nerds are naturally attracted to fancy cameras and color-coded databases? Yes, magnetically so. They also like assignments with clear guidelines. I've organized some of my favorite photos from the Santa Cruz portrait project into three posts, each fitting a vague category: by the sea, around town, and in the woods and hills. Our actual guidelines from the city were much more specific than that, for which I was nerdily grateful.

PHOTOS BY THE SEA

Santa Cruz is a beach town and offers a multitude of oceanside venues. I'm sure the first picture I ever took in Santa Cruz was by the water. During my first year living here after moving from Massachusetts, I spent time on Westcliff Drive nearly every day, sometimes walking for hours. I never got tired of looking at the California coastline. Wandering by the sea helped me grieve after a tragic death in my family, and the beauty of the ocean gave me hope that my life would seem beautiful again someday. When I look at my earliest pictures of this place, I remember that surprising faint hope growing stronger as I walked more, photographed more, let my appreciation flow out through the lens to embrace what I was seeing.

Sometimes I wandered over to the Boardwalk, and I still do, usually when I want to smell the fried dough and hear people screaming and see a throng of strangers from out of town. The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is California's oldest surviving beachfront amusement park, and it draws nearly two million visitors every year. I've only tried out its rides a handful of times, but I've walked around and underneath them often. I love the experience of being in this carnival atmosphere next to the ocean. I also love to look down on the Boardwalk from Eastcliff Drive, especially at night, and I've taken many photos of it from there under varying conditions. The park's colorful rides and architecture are an anchor, a reference point along the Santa Cruz coastline.

You can see the Boardwalk from the wharf, too. Up on Westcliff Drive you can see them both at the same time, and at sunset this can be quite a pretty sight. The wharf is another of my favorite places to hang out when I want to see strangers. On Saturday afternoons, tourists dominate its sidewalks, and even early in the morning I see mostly people I don't know from around town. At the end of the pier are square cutouts in the planking with railings around them where you can look down at the sea lions as they sleep and swim and fight in that cold, cold water. These windows into sea lion life are often flanked by little kids who are thrilled by what they see below. Watching the little kids watch the sea lions is sure to cheer me up if I'm feeling sad.

It took me a few years to discover the Santa Cruz Yacht Harbor, which is separated from the Boardwalk by Seabright Beach. The harbor is another place that looks enchanted at night and when the fog rolls in. Lots of the boats have lights on them and they twinkle in the mist. I thought I had a photo of the harbor at night to submit with this assignment, but I couldn't find it. I should probably go take another one. There are plenty of things in Santa Cruz I want to take another picture of, even though I've lived here for nearly a decade. 

FAMILIAR AND BELOVED

I mentioned hours of walking on Westcliff Drive and how healing that activity can be. Two particular spots on this path have special meaning for me. One is Lighthouse Field State Beach, a place I've loved dearly since my first visit from Massachusetts, several years before I moved to Santa Cruz. As the California State Park website points out, this is one of the last open headlands in any California urban area. On the beach side of Westcliff stands the lighthouse and surf museum; from there you can look down at surfers crowding into Steamer Lane.

For me, the best part of Lighthouse Field is the park on the other side of Westcliff, Lighthouse Field itself, where I've spent happy afternoons perched in the huge cypress trees. I've seen monarch butterflies and owls and snakes and feral cats there. I've shivered in the midnight fog there, and stared at the moon, not wanting to go home to sleep because I felt like I was already dreaming. In the daytime, it's been transformed from eerie magic into friendly magic, especially back when dogs were allowed off-leash. I would walk through the park on my way home from work around 5:30 and a dozen or so happy bouncing canines would greet me as they ran by me on the trail, their owners just having left work themselves. It always made me laugh to see those doggie faces and hear people calling them back from investigations of gopher holes and squirrels in trees.

I haven't spent much time at Lighthouse Field in the past few years. Writing this now makes me want to remedy that. If I go there at midnight with a poetry-loving friend, can the old enchantment of my first months in Santa Cruz be recaptured?

The other place I loved most during my first few years here was Natural Bridges State Beach. Sometimes I reached it while in a restless mood, by walking on Westcliff all the way to the end. Sometimes I just stopped in for a moment after work, back when I spent my days in an office on Swift Street, to look down the hill at the sea before walking home. Later, when Patrick and I started Red Bat, we used to work in his apartment near Natural Bridges. I'd leave after a day of processing photos and start the journey home by going through the park from the Delaware Street entrance. I'd get photos of sunsets on that gorgeous beach as I strolled, and reach my final destination with stars in my eyes. I realize how cliche that phrase is, but it's an accurate description of how my eyes saw the world after that two-hour walk.

When my nephew was a toddler and his family still lived downtown, I'd take him with me on the bus to Natural Bridges. We'd explore every inch of it in the way that only a toddler and his willing accomplice can. That was the year I learned how wonderfully diverse this nature preserve really is. Besides the beach, there is coastal scrub to explore, a eucalyptus grove where thousands of monarch butterflies spend the winter, and grasslands with wildflowers. I could say more, but this park really deserves its own photo gallery and blog post.

When the monarchs come back this fall, I'll make sure to get out there with a telephoto lens so you can see what it looks like when hundreds of them cling to one branch, wings quivering in the still air. You'll have to use your imagination for the part where they breathe together in the silence, while humans far below gaze up at them in awe.  

SANCTUARY FOR DREAMERS

I am lucky to live in this California seaside town. Before I came here, I lived in a coastal town on the other side of the country. It was charming in its own New England fashion, and it paved the way for my appreciation of Santa Cruz. Here I found more sunny days than in Massachusetts, more vibrant colors, and more cliffs above the ocean. Here I got my hands on a camera, and discovered how easily my new hometown yielded its beauty to be captured by an opportunist like me. Someone looking out for the main visual chance, with my own private reasons for needing to squeeze something mystical out of everyday sights.

By the sea, the possibilities are endless, the light ever-changing. Tides can bring plump kelp to the beach to glow in the first rays of the sunrise. Summer fog can obscure the horizon, leaving craggy boulders marooned on the edge of grey nothingness. Breaking waves can roll into foam, pushing lacy white edges into perfect arcs on the sand. In tidepools the landscape reflects itself using subtle, delicious colors. I can shoot and process and look and shoot again, never catching exactly what I see, because what I see becomes overlaid with fragments of memories from countless walking daydreams. My sense of where I am is in a constant state of metamorphosis here that echoes the supple nature of the shoreline. 

Many of my favorite photos by the sea have been taken at twilight, when time stops for a moment and the air shimmers in the sudden absence of sunshine. That pause always seems full of secrets, invisible spirit world doings, collective sighs of release from the day that's now gone. The shoreline lets go of light slowly and gradually around here, melting it first into colors to wrench the heart. Most evenings, it's a long sweet goodbye to the sun, staged simultaneously with a tender introduction to the stars– and of course the moon, if there is one. In the photo above, I saw the moon show up like a bashful giant, ready to join the dinner party on the balcony but already plotting its departure. I remember wondering if the other party guests could see it from where they stood, and if it looked as enormous from their perspective as it did from mine.

I remember too my first sight of Seabright Beach, as I walked above it on Eastcliff Drive just after sunset a few months into my residence in Santa Cruz. Bonfires flickered near and far below me on the sand. I was bewitched by them and what they indicated: little circles of humans on the edge of land engaged in ancient flame-stoking rites, possibly roasting marshmallows and singing songs, while the sky turned dark and the fog slowly engulfed them. Several years later, I became part of a fire circle myself, as my family established a new tradition of an annual beach bonfire just after Thanksgiving. That was 2007, the same year Red Bat Photography got started, the same year my nephew was born. Life was full of brave ideas and unrevealed plots. It's hard to believe I'm now writing about it from a distance of six years.

 

Comments

[Joye]

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