pleasure beach

A strange thing happened to me Sunday.

A friend and I traveled to Pleasure Beach, the soon to be demolished abandoned beach community on the Connecticut coast, and made the long journey along the two-mile sandbar in roaring wind in search of the somewhat unknown- I had been here one night 3 months prior. We arrived around noon, and my friend was ecstatic, saying how the neighborhood felt like a ghost town, then it started snowing, and to me it felt more like nuclear winter. We started at the amusement park and worked our way back.

I was disappointed to find how trashed the community was since I had last been there. Every window on nearly every house had been systematically shattered, contents of each building thrown about as if the howling outside wind that day had entered each cottage. Vandals. I had come to this island with such excitement of being able to capture hundreds of amazing shots in these houses, and instead all I was seeing in front of me was destruction in the name of suburban teenage boredom. I was crushed.

But then my friend and I were shooting in one of the cottages when a middle-aged couple approached a shattered window. “Hi, how are you, taking pictures?” I answered in the affirmative. They must be more people wandering the grounds, poking around, like the dozen or so others we had encountered that afternoon. News of the recent sale of the land had been in local papers recently, and people were curious to check out the grounds before the community was razed. Only I was way off. This man then began to give us a stern lecture about how we were breaking and entering and trespassing in what had actually been THEIR house, and that the land and cottage were now the property of Stratford, and no one should be in there.

I felt like the biggest asshole at that very moment. 45 cottages on the island, and we had to be in the exact one this exact couple owned at the exact moment they were to walk up to it. Glorious.

“Sorry,” I muttered, and stared at my feet. I waited what seemed like eons for my friend to pack up her lenses, and we shuffled out the shattered glass back door, wife and husband staring at us. The wife was sobbing.

“You want to take a picture?? Take a picture of our FACES!!” she sobbed, red faced, losing composure. I don’t think I could have felt much worse at that moment.

This house belonged to these people. It probably held years of fond memories of sunsets on the beach, evenings on the boardwalks, days in the water. And now everything they owned in this house of theirs had literally been torn to shreds. Clothes were ripped from the closets, beer cans littered the floor. Broken glass was everywhere. Personal paperwork was strewn about the rooms, shopping list still on the fridge. Strangers had invaded their territory and basically pissed on it.

And here I am, some asshole with a camera, going through their memories and the destruction and disrespect for their lives, taking pictures of their misfortune, dancing on their losses.

Sometimes when in these places taking pictures of restraints in a mental hospital, or looking through patient files or rifling through old rotted clothing I forget that these things actually had a human attached to them at some point. Somehow running through an institution is different to me though. Those things belonged to the state, or most of them did, such as the medical equipment. No one really had an attachment to them. But that torn baby photo tacked to the wall in that cottage, that had a memory for someone. That collection of seashells all over the table and floor, somebody too the time to pick each one of those, and held onto them for a reason. I don’t know, I can’t explain it, but it’s just different. If I would have been in a mental hospital shooting in a room and somebody randomly walked in and said, “I used to live in this room!” I’m not sure that I would have been as affected as I was by that poor married couple.

For all of my photos from Sunday go here and here.