I’ve been coming to McGrath Pond and Salmon Lake my entire life. My mother, Frances Fox Sandmel, and my grandmother, Hortense Langsdorf Fox, adored the lakes and the woods. They could identify many of the flora and fauna we encountered, and taught me reverence for the natural world. I also love the lakes – especially exploring them in a kayak, which allows me to go slow and observe closely. I take most of my pictures from the kayak.
I bought my first camera in 2012, specifically to photograph on Salmon and McGrath. The camera has helped me see much more than I ever did before, such as the vast variety of life (large and small) or the changing moods of the lake and the woods.
For this brief photo essay, I struggled to choose six pictures – in the past decade I’ve taken thousands – and decided not to focus on the photographs first, but rather to come up with words or phrases that reflect different aspects of my relationship to these lakes and find a representative picture for each. This made the process easier, but the final decisions were still tough!
Every day on The Lake is different. There are always Colors, Small Things, Drama, Surprise, and Awe.