In fall of 2004, following my growing obsession with maritime weather models, cold-water wax, and 7mm neoprene mittens, I began documenting surfing in New York City. My life as I knew it had succumbed to my constant urge to surf, and it became clear to me that my photography would suffer from neglect if I did not begin to document the new passion that occupied most of my waking thoughts and many of my dreaming ones.

The project title, Right Coast, is a nickname for the East Coast that not only indicates its location on the continental US, but also asserts an underdog’s dreams of superiority. Surfing on the right coast, particularly in New York City’s Rockaway Beach, lacks most of the lifestyle and allure of West Coast surfing. Yet making up for the dearth of good weather, consistent waves, and beautiful surf spots is a community that has a surfeit of heart, dedication, and soul. Or in a word, aloha.

In fall of 2012, less than a year after I concluded this series, Hurricane Sandy devastated Rockaway Beach, forever altering the landscape and our relationship to the sea. These photographs have become a testament to halcyon days, to a way of life lost, and to a life regained.

All photographs of Right Coast are 20”x24” type c-prints, editions of 7

Right Coast is available as a limited edition monograph through www.susannahray.com. With 48 color plates, it features essays by Sean Corcoran, Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, and Joel Patterson, former Editor-in-Chief at TransWorld SURF and SURFER magazines.

What are the Wild Waves Saying: Storm Stories from the Rockaways was a collaboration between photographer Susannah Ray and senior WNYC radio producer Jen Poyant made in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Jen and Susannah, Rockaway residents themselves, set out to document the experiences and impacts of the storm by combining audio of storm stories with portraits and landscapes.

The full project may be seen at www.wildwavesrockaway.com

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“How high did the water come at your place?” was the common refrain among neighbors, friends, even strangers, across the Rockaways in the days after Sandy struck.

The storm’s seventeen foot surge pushed across the peninsula, leaving behind water-logged basements and first floors, their remnants piled in front of home after home, block after block. The boardwalk, which nearly ran the length of the peninsula, was severed from its concrete foundation, slammed into shorefront homes and deposited on cars. It was an unprecedented disaster in the Rockaways and countless other coastal communities, where the scale and scope of the trauma, suffering and uncertainty would unfold slowly in the following weeks and months.

Every person had a storm story.

People told tales of survival, digging out, rebuilding, and hoping for things to get back to normal. Each person’s story reflects a long history of settlement along the peninsula, from the close-knit Breezy Point community on the west end all the way to Far Rockaway on the east. The floodwaters united the disparate populations of the peninsula through shared trauma and struggle, yet as they receded and the clean-up dragged on, longstanding differences resurfaced.

What are the Wild Waves Saying: Storm Stories from the Rockaways documents the individuals that comprise the complex community of the Rockaways. The audio interviews and photographic portraits delve into each subject’s storm story and uncover the deep connections to the land and the sea.

The Rockaways are at a turning point, one faced by ocean-front communities in the age of climate change. Questions of rebuilding and future development loom, while lives are sustained by memories of golden summers and the boardwalk that once bound the Rockaways together.

Walt Whitman, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” ecstatically invokes New York City’s waterways. Passionately, deliriously, Whitman calls out to the tides, the gulls, the ferry passengers, the light, the clouds, the ships, the sailors, the waves, the cities on the far shore. All humans are divine in his eyes, their reflected faces anointed by “fine spokes of light” in the passing waters. “Suspend” he cries, celebrating these moments unmoored from the sure time of the city.

I come to Whitman’s water in my most recent work, A Further Shore. Inspired by the unfettered humanism of Whitman and by the shifting light and reflective waters of American Luminism, I am gathering images of life upon and alongside New York City’s waterways. After the ravages of Hurricane Sandy, I find it necessary to re-embrace the water as timeless balm, revelation, and rejuvenation.

The title, A Further Shore, conjures the distant spires of Manhattan, as seen across the bays and harbors, rivers and creeks, and also returns the viewer to the far reaches of the outer boroughs. There, time moves according to season, ceaselessly circling back upon itself, eschewing the forward march of the grid. Daylight lengthens, the water warms and resounds with voices and motors. Daylight shortens, the waters cool into icy silence. Shoreline remnants tangle into fictive histories. Bridges arc from shore to shore, steel longings drawn between boroughs, eternally crossing the tides below.



It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so

many generations hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt…

-Walt Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Sand, everywhere on everything, sand and more sand. Chip bags cartwheeling across the beach or scavenged by seagulls, umbrellas turned inside-out, stuffed into overstuffed garbage cans. String bikinis and dime store towels, legs, arms, torsos, bellies, backs, covered in sand and more sand. Voices, thousands of them, carried inland by the onshore winds, commingled shouts that ebb and flow like the waves, a constant hum only interrupted by the rattle of the train that disgorges more and more bodies seeking relief from the summer heat.

They all come down for the day. Camps set up shoulder to shoulder, mini-habitations, refugees from the city. Running into the water with a shout. By August it's like a bathtub. The late-afternoon sun, relentless, lowering in the sky, the shadows grow long, lifeguard whistles from one stand then the next, like a virus up and down the beach: everybody out. Shaking sheets and packing coolers, missing flip-flops and crying toddlers, trying to rinse off the sand, its everywhere on everything, sand, sand, and more sand.