Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum

Author's Comments

The lighthouse is small. That is the first thing that surprises people who have only seen it in photographs, where the framing tends to flatten the water around it and make it seem more monumental than it is. The Hooper Strait Lighthouse stands on screw pilings driven into the floor of the Miles River harbor, a hexagonal cottage perched above the water on iron legs, painted white and red in the way of old government work. It was built in 1879 and moved here in 1966 and it looks entirely at home, which says something about how well the Chesapeake fits its own history. I have photographed it in September, late afternoon, when the light goes honey-colored and the harbor is still. That is the version everyone is after and it earns the cliché. The structure takes the warm light well, and the reflections in calm water are genuinely painterly. The better composition, though, is not straight-on but from the crab deck at an angle, with one of the historic workboats in the middle distance and the lighthouse reading as smaller, more solitary against the tree line across the water. The museum campus itself repays slower attention. The boat sheds, the weathered dock planking, the hulls of old buy boats hauled up for restoration. These are working shapes, built for the bay, and the afternoon light finds them the way it finds everything old and functional - without flattery, with honesty. Come in May if the summer crowds concern you. The light is softer, the docks are quieter, and the water has a particular blue that July will replace with something heavier.

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