Sailboat Racing off the New Hampshire Coast | Joe Klementovich, Editorial Photographer
Sailboat Racing — New Hampshire Coast
Some projects start without a clear destination. This one began simply: I wanted to photograph sailboat racing off the New Hampshire coast, drawn by the same thing that pulls me toward most assignments — the intersection of people, skill, and moving water. New Hampshire has one of the shortest coastlines of any coastal state in the country, just 18 miles, but what happens on that water is anything but small. Racing sailboats are unforgiving subjects. The light shifts fast, the boats move faster, and you're working from a moving platform trying to hold a frame on something that has no interest in cooperating. That tension is exactly what I like. What I didn't expect was where the work would lead. Spending time on the water here opened doors to a longer conversation about New Hampshire's relationship with its coast — its ecology, its communities, its history — and eventually that conversation found its way into my ongoing work with New Hampshire PBS and the Windows to the Wild series, where the shoreline and its stories became part of a broader project about what makes this state worth paying attention to. These images are from that starting point. The racing. The water. The coast doing what it does.