Photographs by Jim Coarse
Text by Richard L. Gaw

From the time he first received a Fisher-Price 110 camera for his fifth birthday, photographer Jim Coarse has followed the power of his lens and the energy of his curiosity and in the process, creates a story in every photograph he takes. 

Over the past few decades, Coarse has trained his lens on a wide variety of subjects – the blushing bride, the sinewy muscle of a racehorse heading toward the final leg and the beautiful bend of a brook in the middle of a forest. A graduate of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Coarse has been known to bring his cameras on his sailing journeys in Chesapeake Bay, the Green Mountains of Vermont and along the coral sands of the Caribbean. 

Recently, on assignment from Cecil County Life, Coarse was given the creative freedom to wander wherever his camera wished to train its lens on throughout Cecil County, and the results of those journeys – some of which are revealed on these pages – form a tapestry of beauty and moments about a place where we live and work and raise our children and fall in love and disappear into the quiet thicket of a landscape. Here, on these pages, is a love letter to a place and a reminder to everyone who lives here that beauty and moments are fleeting and precious to behold, from the North East River to the Conowingo Dam to the Fair Hill Training Center to Port Deposit.

“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity,” wrote the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Through his own personal sketchbook of Cecil County, Jim Coarse continues to merge beauty and moments together, and for those on the other side of that magic, we are ourselves beholden to that same magic.