All images 10”x10” gelatin silver prints

Summer vacation rentals take on an eerie character in Adam Bell’s series of black and white photographs taken along the New Jersey coast in the 2000s. Photographed at night with strong flash, these structures cease to represent desirable escapes. These blank facades underscore the essential emptiness of the houses; they exist solely as summer homes, vacant for the majority of the year, with little sense of community. Bell’s abstracting photographic style challenges us by portraying these homes as uninviting, stripping them of context, detail, and color and in the process imbuing them with an uncanny tension.

- Charlotte Cotton, (PEEK Catalog, 2005)