Cambria & The California Central Coast 

The Olympus OM-2 once belonged to my Aunty Joy. After she passed, my grandmother gave it to me. She said Aunty Joy would have wanted me to have it.

In 1999, I was living in San Francisco and spent time in Cambria, on California’s Central Coast. I visited often—it wasn’t a homecoming, just a project to photograph the places I knew well.

My grandmother had been part of Cambria’s small art community since the 1970s. I revisited some of the places tied to those years: Captain Nitwit’s Castle, The Brambles, and the old Allied Arts Guild, which once occupied the schoolhouse on Main Street but no longer exists. Most days I followed the coast—fog, tide, and shifting light between Cambria and Morro Bay.

Using Aunty Joy’s camera, I photographed what felt ordinary then and historic now. The negatives have become a time capsule from 1999—fragments of a familiar coastline, caught in a specific light and rhythm.

The same coast. The same light. A different time.