More from Cape Cod: Living Off The Land And The Sea

From Cape Cod: Living Off The Land And The Sea

A selection of images I've been making of Sally Andreola, an oyster farmer in Brewster, Massachusetts on Cape Cod as part of the story, Cape Cod: Living Off The Land And Sea in which I'm interviewing and making images of the people who grow and harvest our food on Cape Cod. The one thing that struck me about Sally and her husband, Scott, as they worked out in the setting sun of Cape Cod Bay was how they work silently as a team, rarely talking, only at times making a few words sentences.

In the forty years I've been doing this kind of work, I never stop being amazed by the people who let me into their lives to learn their stories, who open up to me. I've recently just began doing this work again, after having had taken a hiatus of about ten years to dedicate my life to the theater. I didn't know how much I missed the work, peering into the viewfinder of a Nikon to see what it would reveal to me. The visual language is as real as any spoken language, and I've missed using it. A few years ago I was working with someone in the theater who was directing one of my plays and I kept asking her to repeat what she was saying because, as I tried to explain to her, I couldn't see what she was saying. In absolute frustration she said, you really are visual, aren't you? And she didn't mean that in a good way. But if you tell that same story to a visual person, they just smile knowingly, and perhaps give a small laugh.