Treasure Coast

"Treasure Coast" is an understanding of distance, desire, and displacement within familiar landscapes. It serves as a love letter to the places that I’ve previously escaped from, and the journey of making my way back to them.

Treasure Coast is a photographic series and photo-book of color and black-and-white analog images that is driven by my relationship with the familiar landscapes of my upbringing. Cities don’t feel like home, and I’m left longing for someplace else. This distance draws me towards what has been left in the past. Inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s book “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” and my ever-growing sailing community, I harness this powerful need to discover the desire of what seems far away.

Treasure Coast began with a fascination of Florida’s summer storm weather. Being a sailor and relying so heavily on weather patterns, I found myself wanting to understand Florida's changing climate and beauty. Horizons and shorelines go on forever, slightly shifting in shape and their ability to be separated from one side to the other. Just the same, clouds and weather create such nuanced forms that always demand attention. Expanding on this allure, I began to look at visual representations of nature and water that are man-made. While living in a “concrete jungle” that is the city, I decided to put this concept that I associate negatively with into a visual language placed on a beloved landscape, rewriting my relationship with the city.

Rebecca Solnit’s “The Blue of Distance” was a huge influence in understanding the role blue plays in emotion. Using cyan as a repeating motif for artificiality, the images mimic the real lines of shoreline and ocean through unnatural forms and colors. Using such an outlandish hue to embody “nature” enhances the feeling of being out of place. By using oddity and an emphasis on the importance of texture, there is a sense of unsurity of what is real.

While focusing on landscapes that happen to be losing the battle to rising sea levels, many of these images may not be replicable. I feel that there is a need to give respect to nature which I am currently working to fully realize, and I hope to offer a chance to explore one’s own distance from places they’ve left as they’ve explored my own distance.

Ella Sevier Simmons is a photographer based in South Florida and New York City. Her work explores the importance of place, environment, and memory through documentation, fascination, and abstraction. She has received Departmental Honors in Photography and Fashion Communication at Parsons School of Design (BFA, 2024) and has worked in the sailing industry for the past eight years.