I can smell the water

Unearthing a photo album that was in the flood of my home during Hurricane Sandy instigated my series, I can smell the water. When I saw these family photos for the first time, the black and white silver halide prints were fused with their plastic sleeves on detached metal spines. The subject of the photos, were of my grandmother in Palestine just a few years after surviving the Holocaust. In the majority of the pictures she is smiling on a beach. This discovery made me consider the many generations of my family have been living by the sea, working with it, getting joy from it, defining ourselves by it -- even my last name Kahn means small boat in German. Now after years of living by the water, my family is looking to move away from the volatile and unpredictable coast in an effort to skirt the negative impacts of climate change. I return to the Manhattan Beach to make portraits of neighborhood youth. My grandmother’s stories ingrained in me a belief that teenagers have a singular sense of bravery and resilience, traits they will need to activate as they respond to the climate crisis. The portraits in this series have been submerged in ocean water I collected from Manhattan Beach for the same length of time my family archives sat in our basement during the flood. Unlike the photographs of my grandmother, this deliberate gesture is an investigation of control--an act of preemptive grief built directly into the process of making the work.