Sunken Meadow Park, Long Island
Before I started working on the Outer Lands project, I knew very little about Long Island. Brooklyn and Queens aside, I could count the number of times I’ve visited elsewhere on the island on one hand.
I’ve become more interested in documenting the process of putting together this project, and have been creating a digital archive of GPS-coded photographs of sites on Flickr, journal entries and placemarkers in Google Earth, and a wide collection of web bookmarks. I’ve been spending a lot of time on Wikipedia and Google Maps, too, hunting for new locations.
I can now tell you an awful lot about the state parks and more-or-less natural areas of Long Island within 50 miles of New York City. Sunken Meadow Park, a hilly, forested area overlooking the Long Island Sound on the north shore, has become second only to Watch Hill on Fire Island as a favorite place to visit.
The views of the trees and water from up in the hills are breathtaking, but from all of the “vista” photographs I took, I ended up choosing this image of a broken fence near the entrance as my favorite. It sums up a lot about what I have been trying to show with this project, and feels like a turning point in some ways. A thesis statement, if you will, that I will be working from as I move forward with the project.
February 27, 2009