Eduardo Nave is a photographer and visual artist from from Spain. He sent us is portfolio titled Amity – a JAWS story accompanied with this introduction.
My personal projects focus on places where significant events have taken place and the possibility that spaces might retain traces of what happened there.
On June 20th, to mark the 50th anniversary of the release of Jaws (1975), directed by Steven Spielberg, I travelled to Martha’s Vineyard, the island where the film was shot, to develop Amity, a photographic essay that explores how cinematic fiction continues to shape the way we see the world.
This project does not aim to reconstruct scenes or identify film locations, but to observe how a movie can transform the perception of a real landscape. Fifty years later, everyday elements such as a dock, a fence, or the light on the water can evoke something that never happened, but that we all believe we have seen. As if an echo still lingers, or something stirs beneath the surface of the water.
Eduardo Nave
THE ISLAND OF SHARKS by Rodrigo Cortés (excerpts)
“The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.” That’s not the worst opening for a novel aimed at a readership that the most optimistic folks at Doubleday—the imprint that had paid a $7,500 advance to a journalist and occasional speechwriter for Lyndon B. Johnson—envisioned as sizable but not massive, and it leaves few doubts about who the real main character will be. Four pages later, it describes the attack on the first victim, Chrissie, with inspired precision, not sparing a single laceration, scream, spasm, shred of flesh, splash, jerk, or bloody trail. Paradoxically, the start of the script is less prosaic: “Sounds of the innerspaces rushing forward. Then a splinter of blue light in the center of the picture. It breaks wide, showing the top and bottom a silhouetted curtain of razor sharp teeth suggesting that we are inside of a tremendous gullet, looking out at the onrushing undersea world at night.” Fortunately, the film that made an entire planet believe that “jaws” meant “shark” doesn’t actually start that way: a subjective shot scans the sea floor as the first credits roll by, sparing us the jaws in the original title—the first of many smart choices by its director. Yet there is room for a third opening: “The photographer arrives at the island of Martha’s Vineyard fifty years after Jaws started filming, ready to witness what a cast and crew once saw—even though they were never quite sure of what they were doing.” The author of the novel is Peter Benchley; the director of the film is Steven Spielberg; and the latter-day photographer (henceforth, the Photographer) is Eduardo Nave.
In April 2024, the Photographer boards an Airbus A330-200 in Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport heading to Boston Logan International Airport. After landing, he rents a Geyser Blue Subaru Forester Wilderness and drives for two hours to Woods Hole on Cape Cod Bay, in the Gulf of Maine. At Woods Hole harbor, he makes a fog-enshrouded ferry crossing to Vineyard Haven, the largest and best equipped port on Martha’s Vineyard, the island of the wealthy where Jaws was filmed (is filmed) fifty years ago.
(…)
With his medium-format Fujifilm GFX100S camera slung over his shoulder, the Photographer discovers that Martha’s Vineyard—or The Vineyard, as locals call it—looks the same as the Amity in the book: neat blue, gray, and white clapboard houses; postcard-perfect harbors and docks; inlets calming the water that should allow (should have allowed) a smooth film shoot. In South Beach, the rudimentary yellow pine fences marking communal access points are still staked in the sand. The area is peppered with “no trespassing” signs because, unlike in Europe, private beaches are the norm. The Photographer rents a small house on the south part of the island, tucked in the woods—away from the coast everything is forest, tangled and dry, as if Tarrytown from Sleepy Hollow had moved to the heart of the island and lost its lush vitality: a single match and it could all go up in smoke.
(…)
The Photographer documents time, as he has in past projects: Normandy, Pompeii, La Palma, the ETA terrorist attacks… The past, present, and future occupy the same place for him: repeating a frame is tantamount to returning to the exact moment when everything happened (happens), retracing the filmmaker’s tracks, and then extending them. If movies are a truth fabricated of lies, today he follows in the footsteps of the best of them, though he wields different weapons. The reporter seizes opportunities: everything happens quickly. The filmmaker builds: everything takes time. Amity doesn’t change; Martha’s Vineyard does. The Vineyard is real; Amity isn’t. Even though the Photographer loves long exposures that capture the inexorable march of life between two clicks, the sea changes constantly and the open shutter turns it into a blurry carpet. It’s a reject. The photographer of the past, Bill Butler, uses dense filters that turn day into night; he seeks black clouds on the horizon; the sun high in the sky, reflected in the water, masquerading as the moon. The Photographer of the present makes sure to witness (to imagine) every attack, swim, or line at the exact moment Spielberg said “Action.” Sometimes he returns and records the fourth wall: he can see the director, the script, the head of makeup, the microphone technician; everything that the actors sense in life’s reverse angle, where they are all holding their breath. If the attack is at night, the Photographer goes back at dawn and documents the moment when the tide washes in the corpse. He captures its ghost with a click. (…)
Rodrigo Cortés
