The Shore, 2025
The Shore, 2025 is an edition of landscape photographs by artist Lincoln Schatz that engage with the relationship between land, water and sky along the shores of Lake Michigan. Spanning ten years, this edition by Schatz creates a cyclical story of passing seasons, time and landscape.
“A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
After a decade spent photographing Lake Michigan, Schatz knows the lake and the land which surrounds it well. With each year it continues to educate him about its character, revealing new sides to this landscape he visits often.
The passage of long-time focused on a single landscape, captured here by Schatz in The Shore, 2025, creates a multi-faceted portrait of place over time. This long term engagement with Lake Michigan rewards the patient, bringing into being nuanced photographs of this complex natural and human-made world.
Schatz most often arrives to Lake Michigan at dawn, coming frequently before first light. This is when the lake and the landscape are alone with one another. While most of the city still sleeps, the lake is wild and alive.
“The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
The waterscape of Lake Michigan never repeats itself. Its nature is transitory, the water and the sky overhead endlessly changing with every passing hour. The lake functions as a mirror, reflecting the world around it in its waters.
The lake along the city is highly contained, with steel and concrete walls keeping it at bay, holding back the waters and creating a series of artificial harbors that protect both boats and people. The land that stretches away from the lake here is similarly man-made.
Created from the rubble of the Great Fire in many areas, the parks that connect from Evanston to Indiana create interlinking green spaces that hem in the lake. They are largely mown and manicured by the city of Chicago. In The Shore, 2025, the land becomes a stage for the city directly adjacent to it.
Each season brings changes to the shore, the beaches reshape and form new contours, trees are brought down by storms and in recent years temporary walls, built of large sandbags attempt to keep the waters of Lake Michigan at bay. It is an endless negotiation between the wild and the tamed, highlighting the power of this large body of freshwater to impact everything that surrounds it.
The trees found in, The Shore, 2025, are all denuded of leaves. Those closest to the water often becoming covered in ice as winds toss the lake waters onto shore in wintertime. Their dark branches stand in stark contrast to the sky above.
Many of the trees found here along the lake possess a resilience that is remarkable. Able to withstand cold temperatures and harsh conditions. They are scrubby, many have thorns with hooked barbs. They hug the ground and often blur the line between tree and shrub. While many of the more stately trees, including oaks, maples and weeping willows struggle with every successive winter, trees like the one found in, The Shore, 2025 (2) thrive against all odds.
“Standing on the shore overlooking Lake Michigan, deep in winter, my eyelashes freeze to the camera viewfinder as I photograph. The camera image enters my eye and I see a lake transformed into a solid expanse that extends out to the horizon. I feel my feet on the frozen ground, I too am part of this landscape. This temporal moment will give way to a new one tomorrow when I return again to photograph. In a few months I will be swimming in the lake at this very spot, it is almost impossible to imagine this possibility deep in winter.”
Lincoln Schatz
In winter the near shore lake freezes solid. Joining and extending the land out onto the water. Large pieces of ice join together, creating a terrestrial surface filled with texture and pattern. As time passes and temperatures warm and cool, the ice changes form before eventually turning back into water.
“Nature works by contraries. That which in summer was most fluid and unresting is now most solid and motionless.”
Henry David Thoreau, Journal, February 11th, 1859
In summer the lakefront transforms again, with millions of annual visitors drawn to the water during long hot days. While the beaches fill with visitors, there are still places where one can be alone with the water and shore. Schatz seeks these hidden locations when the landscape becomes too crowded, finding in the details of the lake a world of wonder.
“Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Throughout this edition from Schatz we are reminded again and again of how manifold the lake is. Schatz reveals, through his long term commitment to this dynamic landscape that the lake and shore are never truly at rest. This is why he returns, drawn to a landscape that refuses easy understanding, instead encouraging viewers to take time with the lake.
