“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
— Virginia Woolf
The Wharf Where Time Forgot, Monterey, CA, 2009
Beneath the waning orange light of a day's last breath, there lies a place where the sea keeps its secrets and the wood of the wharf remembers every step ever taken. This is not merely Fisherman’s Wharf of Monterey. Not anymore. This is a threshold.
She came here every evening, an old woman in a shawl stitched with constellations, walking the low-tide shore with eyes like tide pools, glassy and full of storm. No one remembered her name, only that she spoke to the pilings, those ancient barnacle-draped limbs rising from the sand like the fingers of drowned sailors still reaching for the moon.
"Do you hear them tonight?" she would ask no one and everyone.
Locals said she had once been a lighthouse keeper’s daughter, raised by lantern light and salt air, who fell in love with a sailor who never returned. They said she waited still. But others, those who listened differently, swore she was the sea itself, mourning a time before names, when the ocean and the sky had no division, and every pier was a prayer.
The buildings, weathered and dignified, rise on stilts above the water, not like structures, but like keepers of memory. Each window glows faintly, a lantern in the fog of forgetfulness. The boats beyond sit hushed, mast against mast like quills in an inkpot, ready to write the next chapter of some old myth.
Beneath the surface, ghosts stir, kelp undulating like hair in slow motion, crabs ticking across the sand like misplaced timepieces. The tide is both arrival and departure. And always, the soft murmur: stories not told, merely felt.
You cannot stand here and not feel it, that uncanny pull. As though the wharf itself, aged and dreaming, waits not just for the return of the tide, but for you to remember something you've never known.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
As an artist, I dwell in the interstice between dream and documentation. My work resists the factual in favor of the poetic, dismantling linear time and embracing the unresolved. Each image I create is a layered lyric, part self-portrait, part séance, part myth.
In The Wharf Where Time Forgot, I revisit a place many would call familiar. And yet, through my lens, it becomes something other: a haunted threshold, a realm of memory and salt. I am drawn to such landscapes not for what they show, but for what they conceal—for their ability to become vessels of personal and collective mythology.
I use photography not to answer, but to ask: What haunts us? What calls us back? What does the sea remember that we do not?
My process is as much about listening as it is about seeing. I believe stories live in the shadows and reflections, in the soft blur of twilight, in the details we overlook. By capturing those fleeting, in-between moments, I hope to preserve not just the image, but the feeling, the ineffable mood that hovers, unnamed, just behind the veil.