I have been a summer visitor to the island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Cape Cod, every year since 1986.
My family and I stay in the town of Chilmark, on a dirt road overlooking a sheep farm with a view of the ocean.
Chilmark is a place of natural beauty and rolling fields—horses grazing in green pastures, an abandoned rusty windmill, tree branches naturally twisted into intricate knots, dune grass reflected in pristine ponds and inlets. Over the years, the ocean leaves its mark. Clay cliffs change shape, and coastlines reinvent themselves. Yet, images of the ocean itself remain virtually unchanged across generations, as though time has refused to halt.
As a photographer, this summer I became acutely aware of the ocean’s presence in unexpected places—boundless yet elusive. I decided to document her influence without revealing her face, capturing evidence of her presence in the most natural ways: in the weathered wood of a doorframe, the rust on a lamp, a lush pasture alive with horses, a garland of sea grapes washed up on the shore—environments where time occasionally seems to stop.Thoughts of the ocean were everywhere and nowhere, guiding every shot. The images found me as much as I found them.
About Donna Gordon
Donna Gordon is a figurative and portrait artist who embraces photography, photo transfer, and photogravure in various ways and at different times to investigate, deconstruct, and rebuild the human form. She was a 2024 MacDowell Fellow and received the 2024 LensCulture Jurors’ Choice Award. She also received the 2024 and 2023 Julia Margaret Cameron Award for a portrait series, with work from the series exhibited at FotoNostrum Gallery in Barcelona in 2024.Her work has been featured in Shots Magazine, Lenscratch, The Hand, and Art.Doc. Prints, photographs, and drawings have been showcased in both solo and group exhibitions at the Danforth Art Museum, Soho Photo Gallery, Fitchburg Art Museum, Cape Cod Museum, Cove St. Arts, ArtsWorcester, Providence Art Gallery, Bromfield Gallery, Kingston Gallery, Galatea Fine Art, Concord Art Association, George Marshall Store Gallery, Site:Brooklyn, Featherstone Gallery, Union of Maine Visual Artists, Attleboro Art Museum, and Cambridge Art Association.
Her collaboration with Amnesty International on former political prisoners culminated in Putting Faces on the Unimaginable: Portraits and Interviews with Former Prisoners of Conscience, exhibited at Harvard’s Fogg Museum. Gordon is also a fiction writer. Her debut novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me (Regal House, 2022), was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best 100 Indie Novels of 2023. [Official Website]
