Artist's statement:
When I began photographing Wildwood fifteen years ago, I did not realize that I was documenting a landscape that would disappear so quickly. I was fascinated with the artifacts of the town's exuberant commercial life, especially late at night or early in the morning when the streets were empty and the boardwalk was quiet. Over the past decade and a half, the pressures of real estate development and extreme weather changed Wildwood and other wonderful Jersey Shore towns irrevocably. I am grateful now that we have this record of Wildwood's iconic past as an inspiration for an even better future.
Bio:
Dorothy Kresz lives in Westchester County, New York, and has vacationed in Cape May each summer for the past 30 years. She has graduate degrees in business and social work and studied at the International Center for Photography in New York. Her photographs have been published in the New York Times and in Travel & Leisure. A catalog of her Wildwood photographs, "Neon-Lit, Kidney-Shaped, Low-Rent, Flat-Roofed, Doo-Wop Commercial Architecture," was published by Pentagram in 2001. She currently works as a psychotherapist in New York and returns to the Jersey Shore with her camera every chance she gets.
