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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. There are moments at the beach when you wish you had a camera. Maybe you see a gorgeous wave, a hilarious reaction to someone tiptoeing into the water, or maybe it's just the whole scene. A new photo exhibition at the space Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York is an essay of a show that shows us the life of beachgoers, specifically people who have made their way to Rockaway Beach, part of the peninsula on the southern edge of Queens. The Rockaways are the only legal surfing beach in New York City by the way. Surfing is what brought photographer Susannah Ray to the area. She lives and works there, and her show Down For the Day, looks at a slice of Rockaway Beach life.

Ray's work has appeared in the New York Times and the New Yorker, and is in the collection of the City Museum of New York and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Down For the Day is at 126 Baxter Street until August 26th and Susannah Ray joins me in studio now. Nice to meet you.

Susannah Ray: Nice to meet you, Alison. Thank you for having me on your show.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, I see from our last segment, people love the Rockaways. We want to open our phone lines to you. What do you like about going to the Rockaways? How do you get there? Do you have any Rockaway tips? What are some places you visit while you're out there? Any restaurants, businesses, anything you want to shout out or you just want to tell us your Rockaways stories or maybe you live in the Rockaways? What's something you'd like people to know about your neighborhood? 212-433-9692, 212-433 WNYC. You can call in and we can talk to you on the air, or you can text to us at that number. You can also reach out on social media, @allofitwnyc. The conversation for the rest of the hour is the Rockaways. Susannah, your work often focuses on New York and New Yorkers' relationship with waterways. When did you become interested in that intersection?

Susannah Ray: Oh, I love that question. I started surfing at the ripe old age of 30 or 31. It opened me up to this absolutely new world in New York City which is the Rockaways. I fell in love with surfing and I felt like if I didn't photograph it, then I would not be making photographs at all because I was consumed. That was the gateway project for me and I have worked on any number of bodies of work that look at the intersection of New York City and its waterways and particularly the way citizens use public space and that public space provides really needed opportunities for escape, for leisure, for transcendence, for joy, and in a complicated environment. It's not a perfect environment either. That's something that I think I highlight in all my projects, especially in the series Down For the Day. That's up at Baxter Street right now.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting to be someone who goes to the Rockaways and takes pictures and you have photojournalist's eyes, but you actually decided to move there.

Susannah Ray: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What made you want to move there?

Susannah Ray: Surfing.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Straight up.

Susannah Ray: Yes. That was quite a while back. I first started sharing a bungalow in 2004 and then moved there officially in 2005 and became part of a very tight-knit community, the surfing community in the Rockaways is extremely close-knit and supportive, although with the expansion of surfing beaches down into the 60s in the Rockaways now there's a whole other cohort of people. We're also aging out a little bit. We have a 12-year-old and focus goes elsewhere. It's incredible to see all of the new faces that have arrived in the Rockaways as well as the enduring local population.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we'd love for you to join this conversation about the Rockaways. We need to remind you though, if you're driving, we can't take your call so you can pull over or get home, get to your location, and call back in. We can't take folks who are driving for safety, obviously. We do want to hear from folks about the Rockaways. What do you like about going to the Rockaways? How do you get there? Do you have any good Rockaways stories or maybe you're from the neighborhood, something you'd like people to know about your neighborhood? 212-433-9692, 212-433 WNYC. Beth is calling in from Asbury Park, New Jersey. Hi Beth, thanks for calling All Of It.

Beth: Hi. Oh, my pleasure. I'm so happy to hear this segment. I grew up in the Bronx and my mother used to take my brother and I for four years to Baroque away to Beach 29th Street just to get out of the city. We would spend the entire summer there. Those years, being at the beach and living on the boardwalk changed my whole life to the point where I now live in Asbury Park at the beach. I walk every day and look at the ocean. I'm four blocks away and my longest-standing friend is still the one I met the first day we ever got there at the age of 10. It was a life-changing experience for me.

Alison Stewart: Oh, love the call. Beth, thank you for calling in. My guest in studio is Susannah Ray. She's a photographer. The name of her show is Down For the Day at Baxter Street. Where does the title come from?

Susannah Ray: Oh, I love that question too, Alison. Down For the Day is a term that I started hearing when I moved to the Rockaways. It is a way to talk about day-trippers. There is maybe a slight connotation to it, a kind of us and them distancing that happens, a way of saying, "We live here year-round, and people who come down for the day." When I made this body of work, I wanted to take that as the title because I wanted to take it back and make it a celebratory thing and really elevate the efforts that people make to come down for the day. They've packed all their beach gear, which your guest on the previous segment was so helpful in identifying what you really need to take with you. They're often coming by subway or maybe by car and they're really coming to create a little patch of paradise for themselves.

I wanted to use that term in a way that would really describe what they were doing but also flip it back to having a more celebratory connotation.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about a few of the photos. View Beach 96th Street. This one is from 2017. It's a large overhead shot of people in the waves. What context does this photo give to people?

Susannah Ray: Yes, that photograph, interestingly enough, made it the smallest scale image in the exhibition. It's right when you walk in and it's a relatively small size print. It's about 13 by 16 inches. It's taking that maximal wide view and shrinking it down to the size of a postcard. I think it provides a footnote or context, but without distracting from the portraits which are, really the focal point of the exhibition. Within that aerial view, you see all these tiny figures, and once you move on to the next set of images, it's as if those tiny figures have been blown up for you to spend more time with.

Alison Stewart: Was there something particular about that location that you chose that location?

Susannah Ray: Oh, for the aerial view?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Susannah Ray:: That was the rooftop of my friend Josh Skier's apartment. My best surf yenta-friend. [laughs] He let me go up to the roof and it was just this incredible view, not just toward the ocean, but toward the bay to the east and west down the peninsula. It was really perspective-changing.

Alison Stewart: The other perspective you have before we get to the portraits, it's a water shot 2018 of people in the water, their backs. What about this moment caught your eye and what part of the Rockaway story does it tell?

Susannah Ray: There's two figures in the center of that photograph. There's a man photographing a woman, and they're standing in the water swirling around them. There was tons of people moving in and out of the ocean, playing, swimming, and I loved that they were trying to encapsulate their experience with that cell phone picture and the woman is striking a beauty pose. Also in the photograph, there's just so many different swimsuits and beach attire. It's just a really busy photograph and it packs a lot of information into one moment, and yet the photograph itself is composed really with an eye toward maybe 19th-century landscape painting or photography, that kind of vista or view. I like bringing in that art historical perspective, but putting in contemporary information.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Emily from Ossining, New York, who's called in. Hi Emily. Thanks for calling in with your Rockaway story.

Emily: I have a story and I've never been to Rockaway Beach except from the ocean. My mother's father, my grandfather, and his brother ran a hotel called the Hotel Pasadena in Rockaway Beach. My mother spent her first several summers, maybe her first five or six summers there with her family. The hotel was carried away in a winter storm. I'm not sure what year, maybe the late '19-teens. She must have had wonderful memories of Rockaway Beach because her request was that her ashes be scattered in the ocean off of Rockaway Beach after she died. While I wasn't immediately able to do that, a young friend who has a sailboat took me and my son in the boat out to the ocean. A bunch of maybe 10 years ago, and we were able to scatter her ashes off Rockaway Beach, [laughs]. I've never actually been there. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: That's a lovely story, Emily. Thank you for calling in. Chris from Fairfield, New Jersey has a question about your process, Susannah. Hi Chris. Thanks for calling in.

Chris: Thanks for having me. I have a question regarding photography. When you're taking pictures, I'm assuming it's digital, but how does that impact how you craft a photo or how you-- The time you take in setting up when you have, let's say an unlimited number of pictures that you can take? Are you just having a scene in your head just clicking away or are you carefully setting up each shot, which would be different in the era of film photography? You might have a limited number of shots you could take

Alison Stewart: Susanna, your process.

Susannah Ray: I actually am using film, so that does affect my process, so I love that you inadvertently brought it in thinking that I was working in a different way. I use digital cameras from time to time, but I grew up with film. I love the meditative quality of working with it, the carefulness that I have to have because I'm using a medium format camera with color film, and I only get, I think it's 10 shots a roll. Once that roll is done, I have to stop and change it, so I'd better be sure about not only what I'm making a picture of, but also the technical settings for my camera. For all my series, but Down for the Day particularly, I do a lot of walking and looking, and then if I'm working on a portrait I do some talking with the person that I'm going to photograph and really, I usually make anywhere between one and three exposures of that subject and then I'm done.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Susannah Ray: If I am using digital you can just keep firing away. I think if you are working with a digital camera, it can be fun to introduce some limitations on yourself. Maybe I only get 10 pictures right now, so what happens to your thinking if you have to conserve and be focused?

Alison Stewart: Thank you for the call, Chris. My guest is Susannah Ray. The name of the exhibition is Down For the Day at Baxter Street Gallery, taking a look at people who come to Rockaway Beach for the day. One photo called Beauty 2019 is a beautiful young Black girl. She's looking directly into the camera. She's got a few tattoos. Her hair is coppery color and it's two braids. Who is she?

Susannah Ray: I don't know. [chuckles] Like many of the photographs, these are really brief relationships that I form with people on the sand. I've called it speed dating at times. When I walk around with my camera, I look for interesting arrangements of groups of people, sometimes interesting outfits, and for that photograph, when I first approached them, they were all lying down and I did some photographs where I'm taking this more aerial perspective over their bodies, and that particular photo I made when she sat up and we had been chatting, and the light was really extraordinary. Not optimal because it's backlit, but she was so striking to me, and that's why I called the photograph Beauty. That's not her name. I don't know it. Some people, I get their names and then I use that as a title. Just the beauty of her presence and of her leisure was so striking to me.

Alison Stewart: Some of these portraits, they're looking directly at you. How do you know when you want to have a subject look at you almost in that way as if they're communicating?

Susannah Ray: I primarily have people in my photographs look into the camera because I'm interested in the exchange, and I'm really interested in recognizing them, acknowledging them, celebrating them. Photographs are representations or re-presentations so we can take something that we know, which is simply another human being, and represent them in a way that we can understand them more fully. Even though these are brief interactions, I hope in my deepest of areas of my heart that I'm representing these people in their fullest moments, because I do think that when we go to spaces of leisure, we are there to find something fuller about ourselves where we're not just a laborer or a worker or a mother or someone who's having a bad day, or someone who's having the best day, that we can really just be the utmost iteration of ourselves.

Alison Stewart: It's also a moment where you're doing what you want.

Susannah Ray: Yes, exactly.

Alison Stewart: This was your choice. You made the choice. You are there because you want to be there. We've got a text that says it is undoubtedly the most diverse surfing beach in the country. I obviously looked at the photos and there are a lot of people of color in your photos. How diverse is Rockaway Beach on an average day?

Susannah Ray: Extremely diverse, and that is something that I thread through-- Really all of my bodies of work is I'm really interested in communal experience that will maybe collapse the things that separate us or the ways that we have inequity or disparity. Those things are very real and they're very present and they're things that many photographers make important bodies of work about. For me, I want to see the ways in which we are connecting as opposed to separating, and I think that actually goes back to becoming a parent where you spend a lot of hours on the playground talking with folks that you would otherwise never meet, and so the beach is the ultimate place for that. Where you're put in this proximity with so many different people.

Alison Stewart: Let's take another call. We'll talk to Terry from Stanford, Connecticut, who's got a very different point of view on Rockaway. Hi Terry. Thanks for calling-- [crosstalk]

Terry: So different.

Alison Stewart: You're on the air. [chuckles]

Terry: In far Rockaway, there's a small hospital and I think it's defunct now. It was called Peninsula Hospital. In its day, I'm talking about 1980s, I was a dental resident there. I went through a year program in which I would get up in the morning. I was living on the Upper East Side, drive my car over there, park across the street behind the hospital facing the beach, and I would go in and you would see this guy walking in with these scrubs and a white jacket. I would go in on a Saturday morning and not get home till Monday afternoon. I just remembered getting out of the car, looking towards the beach, and here I am in Queens and it's such a different experience. If you look towards the beach, you feel like you could have been anywhere along the Atlantic coast, and seeing this beautiful beach, and then you turn around and there's the hospital where I'd have to suffer for the rest of the day and the next day and the day afterwards.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] Terry, thank you for sharing your memory. That's such an interesting point of view. Just also the experience you can have there, by just turning your body around.

Susannah Ray: The juxtapositions are so important. While I think the photos maybe could happen at another beach, I think they are very Rockaway-specific, and like other callers had mentioned, there are people there with their big tents and their encampments. I've seen baby showers and bridal showers and all kinds of birthday parties, but there is something about knowing that in the other direction is the trestle and the subway, and with the bodies of work that I've done in the Rockaways, Those things are always peeking through in some way because I think that context is really important.

Alison Stewart: There's a great photo, which is really fun and I think a little bit funny. It's a couple and the fella has his hand on his girlfriend's bum and it's a sexy picture, and then there's a box of the driskell strawberries, and strangely your eye goes there, [chuckles] and it's called strawberries 2019. Tell me about that picture.

Susannah Ray: I love the stuff that happens and I also love bodies and people in various states of undress on the beach. As a photographer, that's something I wanted to be sensitive about as well because they are more vulnerable. They're also in these intimate moments, so I should also footnote that when I make these photos, they're largely with the subject's permission. The times I don't ask permission are these big wider landscape photographs like water shots. With strawberries, and I love dumb titles, just like the dumber the better, they just were in this really sexy moment and they were young and there's also a lot of candy in that photograph. I think there's Jolly Ranchers in the bottom part of the photograph, and the young lady in the photo is holding a bag of Sour Patch Kids and it's crumpled in her hand.

There's also all these different patterns. In many of my photos in previous bodies of work, I was always minimalist and I got really maximalist in this series. More patterns, more candy, more chip bags, Popeyes, the umbrellas. The more I could pack into that frame the better, so that was just a great opportunity, and like most people, when I asked their permission and I explained what I was doing and I also said, "I really would love if you could just go back to what you were doing." They went right back to it. He had a hold of her touch and who wouldn't? Who wouldn't want to hold onto that?

Alison Stewart: The name of the show is Down For the Day. It is at 126 Baxter Street up until August 26th. My guest has been photographer Susannah Ray. Susannah, thank you for sharing your work with us.

Susannah Ray: Thank you so much, Alison. It was a total pleasure to be here with you.

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