"Off Season": Q&A With Eric Johnson

MEG member Eric Johnson talks about “Off Season,” his new exhibit at Multiple Exposures Gallery at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, VA:

Off Season features compelling landscapes of beaches and beach towns. Most people see these places only in the summer – what drew you to photograph them in quieter times? I have always enjoyed visiting the seashore in the off season - there is much less traffic, and I find it easier to enjoy the natural environment of these places without the summertime crowds. In this project, my goal is to capture the tranquility of these locations during their less-visited months and depict a view rarely seen by a seasonal visitor.

Where did you shoot these images and why did you choose these specific locations? When I was younger, my family would go to Wildwood, NJ or Ocean City, MD several times each summer, and those trips would be one of the highlights of the season for me. On my way back to Washington after Christmas in 2008, I decided on a whim to detour through Wildwood. It had been well over thirty years since my last visit, and I was curious to see how it had changed. It was a foggy, drizzly afternoon, and I spent two or three hours exploring and photographing the deserted boardwalk and beach. In the images that I shot I tried to convey not just a personal nostalgia, but the uniquely peaceful character of the town at that time of year.

     As I continued to revisit the images that I shot that day, the idea for the Off Season project gradually evolved, and I started to consider what other locations would fit into the project. Block Island, RI is one of my favorite places, and I travel there almost every year in early June before the summer season gets fully underway. The image in the exhibit from there, which was really more "shoulder season" than "off season", was taken on a stormy day, giving the beach the same feel as it has in the winter months. The photographs from Ocean City, MD were taken on a winter morning in late February of this year. and the images from Coney Island were taken on Easter Sunday this year. The latter was an unusually warm spring day, and while the boardwalk was as crowded as on a summer day, the water was cold enough that there were relatively few people on the beach.

Your use of black-and-white in this exhibit adds to the haunting quality of many of the images. Did you shoot them assuming you would print them in black-and-white? If so, did it influence or change what you focused on when shooting? I consider myself to be primarily a black-and-white photographer, so most of what I was shooting for this series were previsualized as black-and-white images. As such, I try to emphasize the form and patterns in the subject as the primary compositional elements of each image.

The images are from more than one place, yet the exhibit is very cohesive. What did common threads/themes did you look for when selecting the images you included? While I wanted to convey a sense of quiet and emptiness, I did not want to give the impression that these places are complete ghost towns. That's why I included people, or signs of their recent presence, in several of the images. In addition, I tried to achieve a similar tonal range in all of the images I selected, which was a bit of a challenge, considering that the available light ranged from dense fog to strong winter morning sunlight.                                   
What other projects/portfolios are you working on today? While I have obviously had to suspend work on the Off Season project for the summer, I think there is still more that I would like to do on that theme. I also recently returned from a trip to Alaska, which was one of the most visually spectacular places I have ever visited. I have literally thousands of images to sort through - some landscapes, some abstracts - and that will keep me busy for quite a while!