Malibu Sandbags

Photographing in the vein of the New Topographics, I documented architecture that protects other architecture in Malibu Sandbags. This work explores one example of the complex interactions between humans and nature as I have observed on the beachfront properties of Malibu. The series focuses on Broad Beach, an exclusive stretch of oceanfront in Malibu where homeowners erected sandbags in front of their properties to block the rising sea. Malibu is up-scale and insulated, so with a mix of familiar empathy and more dispassionate irony, this work aims to explore the unexpected economic concerns that environmental change provokes in even the most affluent of communities.  The rising sea level and eroding beaches threaten these choice residential properties. In their battle against the inevitable, the wealthy homeowners of Malibu’s Broad Beach installed sandbags to barricade their investments against the elements. Broad Beach has long been a site of contention between homeowners and beach visitors, between public access and private property. There are public access points to the beach, but the owners’ fight for privacy has made news stories for years. In this notorious private/public territory war, the sandbags served a double function for owners as barriers against the incursions of both wild ocean storms and the public. Thus this project probes the way environmental changes may both exacerbate and mask social divisions. Over two years I photographed the erosion and witnessed the beach get smaller and the barricades larger. Now there’s hardly any beach and imported boulders conceal the sandbags with little practical effect. These photographs serve as precise temporal markers of change within this particular landscape while alluding to broader economic and ecological shifts worldwide, as well as examines the boundaries and limitations that divide us.