“It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.” — Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

Robert Koch Gallery presents Debra Bloomfield’s Changing Seas, a series of richly detailed and expansive photographs exploring the North Atlantic coastline. Water covers more than seventy percent of the Earth’s surface and makes up a good proportion of our own bodies. It shapes climate, sustains life, and has always drawn humans in with its openness and mystery. Bloomfield’s images capture the ocean’s raw power and quiet presence, beginning with a moment of recognition when the landscape reveals something new to her.

In 2015, while teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, Bloomfield developed the course Environmental Landscape Photography to explore how human actions reshape the earth and, in turn, ourselves. Later in her career, while working on her Wilderness series, she studied the work of environmental writers such as Rachel Carson, Margaret and Adolph Murie, Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, and Edward Abbey, which provided inspiration for the direction of her work going forward.

Changing Seas continues Bloomfield’s deep interest and exploration of the environmental landscape. In 2023, Bloomfield returned with her family to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, a place she has visited for forty years. As Hurricane Lee approached the coast, she felt compelled to photograph the sea’s transformation. During one of these walks along the shore, she discovered a bronze statue of Rachel Carson facing the ocean. Encountering the statue felt like meeting an old friend, Bloomfield writes, “Two lives intersecting across time, both drawn to the same shore.” Carson first came to Woods Hole in 1929 to study at the Marine Biological Laboratory; she returned often to continue her research and writing, as Debra continues to do so for her ongoing Changing Seas project.

Bloomfield joins a rich lineage of photographers drawn to the ocean. From Gustave Le Gray, whose nineteenth-century moody maritime seascapes captured the interplay of light and water, to contemporary artists meditating on the sea’s mystery and permanence, this tradition continues through Bloomfield’s striking large-scale photographs.

Bloomfield’s photographs appear in numerous collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; Phoenix Art Museum; and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Three monographs of her work have been produced, including Four Corners (2005, UNM Press), STILL, Oceanscapes (2008, Chronicle Books, San Francisco) and Wilderness (2015, UNM Press).