“Listen. It’s low tide. Oysters spit. A blue heron flushes. Pistol shrimp snap their claws, and the water crackles. A fish thumps a school of baitfish at the surface. That’s how the salt marsh speaks. It’s the soup of life moving around grass and pilings.  Sounds you can almost smell.”

“Undertones offers a window to the southern coast that draws from the places that sheltered, revived and raised us. In this book, Mom and I share the uncommon gifts in each uncommon moment, a look deep inside what we may otherwise pass by on foot or boat. Mom’s shutter clicks and my observations, one page at a time, seek the interconnectivity of these estuaries.”

— Douglas Cutting

What People Are Saying

“This is a book soaked in salt. The seasons move through the pages, storms blow through it, and the tides rise and fall.  It is a world of movement where barnacles seethe, water pulses, shadows lengthen and nets are thrown.  Your guides to this world see more than most of us.  They look deeply, below the surface and the human grid, into the mystery.  The images and sentences, made by the mother and son, work together to let us enter this older shadowed world.  They slow us down and let us see the poetry of old docks, encrusted driftwood, and human artifacts sand-stained and made primal.”

—David Gessner, Award winning author and essayist

“Undertones is more than a compilation of words and photographs to be read and seen; it is a book to be experienced.  In these pages, the southern coast becomes a landscape of inexhaustible wonder.  A marvelous achievement.”

— Ron Rash, The New York Times bestselling author of Serena