In March of 2020 my family and I moved from NYC to Cape Cod to ride out the pandemic lockdown.

I Wish I’d Started Sooner is a diary that began in March 2020, when I moved from NYC to Cape Cod to ride out the pandemic lockdown with my family.

It’s filled with things I would never have predicted. Surgeries. Injuries. Antidepressants. Rehab. Therapy. But also: love and renewal and growth.

Through this all, I was learning to make photographs, photographing the place around me. Cape Cod is a summer destination, but in the off-season, it’s a wild place, filled with magic, wonder, and light. The winter is cold, hard, sea-blown; the spring a miracle of blooms and pale, tender light. The population is sparse. It felt like a private world, and I wanted my pictures to share that emptiness, but also guard its secrets. I won’t name my favorite beach, or the sweetest hidden ponds. Diaries have locks on them for a reason.

I photographed the few people around me. This period had a magic, out-of-time quality, filled with closeness, frustrations, fights, love, and discovery. The people here are my inner circle: my grown children, my aging mother and mother-in-law, my close friends, my wife. They have secrets too and so do I. Those secrets have a feeling. I want you to see that feeling, illuminated by the pale, tender light. It’s so fleeting. It’s here and then it’s gone.