The Third Coast: America’s Great Lakes Shoreline | Options

Photographer David Zurick on the connection between individuals and place

By Anna Faller | Aug. 16, 2025

People go away a mark on the locations we’ve been, whether or not that’s buildings and constructions that may stand for hundreds of years, or one thing as small and insignificant as a footprint within the Lake Michigan sand. It’s all these little imprints, although, that ultimately type a spot’s identification.

In his latest e-book, a photograph assortment entitled The Third Coast: America’s Great Lakes Shoreline, award-winning photographer David Zurick explores the places, tradition, and historical past that outline the Great Lakes area—from the tulips of Holland to Sleeping Bear Dunes to the Straits of Mackinac and past.

“I photograph cultural landscapes because I see them as mirrors that hold the history of humankind in that place,” Zurick says. “In that way, these landscapes tell a story about the people who live there. That’s what I’m getting at.”

Home-State Inspiration

A graduate of the University of Hawaii and East-West Center in Honolulu, Zurick’s personal story begins greater than three many years in the past in his first life instructing school geography. The focus of that work, nevertheless, slowly started to evolve, he says, as soon as he began exploring and incorporating pictures as a device for sophistication instruction.

“I was using photography along with my academics, and eventually, I started to use [it] as a means of communicating,” Zurick explains. “It was like a visual language for me, as opposed to an academic jargon, and as I got more into photography, I started learning how to make images.”

All it took was one chew from the snapshot bug to hook Zurick on full-time pictures. Since then, he’s spent the final 20 years behind a digicam lens, wherein time he’s revealed greater than 12 books—together with the award-winning Illustrated Atlas of the Himalaya (2006) and Morning Coffee on the Goldfish Pond: Seeing a World within the Garden (2017)—and earned numerous accolades.

When COVID struck in 2020, Zurick was pressured again to his home-state of Michigan, the place he unexpectedly discovered himself looking for a brand new creative topic.

“I still wanted to do something creatively with my photography,” he notes. “My internal compass took me north to where I grew up, and as I started taking photographs, it dawned on me what a great place this was to center for a couple of years.”

Four Season, Five Lakes

The results of that endeavor is Zurick’s latest e-book, The Third Coast: America’s Great Lakes Shoreline. Compiled over about 5 years, this assortment of uniquely Midwestern images, which additionally contains a ahead written by acclaimed Michigan writer Jerry Dennis, encapsulates the singular magnificence that defines the Great Lakes all year long.

Structurally, the e-book is split into 5 sections, every representing a lake and a season with a bonus “connecting waterways” class, which progress chronologically (winter, then spring, and many others.) as readers transfer from cowl to cowl.

As for the topics contained in every chapter? Per Zurick, he merely picked the locations he “wanted to be” and let his eye do the remaining. The completed assortment contains photographs from a number of states, together with Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio, in addition to each of Michigan’s peninsulas, from Whitefish Point right down to Lexington and Sanilac counties of the southern “thumb.”

“I began on Lake Huron, because I’d gone up to visit my family,” Zurick says. “That’s also the shoreline of my youth, and autumn has this reminiscent atmosphere to it. That’s how those linked up in my thinking at the time, and how I [decided] to do the lakes as different seasons.”

From there, he says, the icy peaks of Lake Superior made for the clear winter choose; in the meantime, he went for a bustling “summer-in-the-city” theme for Lakes Erie and Ontario.

This left Lake Michigan for spring, which Zurick admits he purposely timed to coincide with the blooming tulips and cherry blossoms, and with it, a bunch of delightfully-familiar spots from Ludington as much as Point Betsie Lighthouse.

People and Portraiture

Zurick is fast to rebuke the title of “landscape photographer” and underscores that he had extra in thoughts for the e-book than only a Great Lakes “inventory.” Instead, he’s crafted these photographs for instance how human influence has, and continues to, form the area, for higher and for worse.

“We give these places character,” he provides. “That’s what I’m interested in photographing.”

A placing instance of this arrives about midway by means of the Lake Michigan part, with a bi-colored shot of the Sleeping Bear Dunes intersected by an ant-sized man. As Zurick factors out, the shot is split into the pure parts of sand and sky—a geometrical “rule of thirds” precept that’s at play all through the e-book—that will in any other case be crisp and clear, if not for the only human imprint.

The theme additionally speaks to Dennis’ level within the ahead about lack of connection: “The greatest threat to the Great Lakes is anything that causes us to lose hope […] is anything that makes us prefer to stay inside our houses,” he writes.

That’s to not say that Zurick’s photographs are totally bereft of individuals. In truth, a lot of his pictures from the Himalayas options portraiture, which was one other creative throughline he aimed to implement in The Third Coast. “Portraiture” right here, although, means people-plus-place, which we see in photographs like “Laura and Colin” or “Paul and Elsa,” taken on Little Traverse Bay and the Platte River Campground, respectively. In every case, the intent was to remind viewers that the Great Lakes are additionally outlined, and even perpetuated, by the those who stay there.

Scale, Majesty, and Diversity

On the flip aspect of that photograph coin, Zurick additionally peppered the e-book with photographs that evoke a way of place minus individuals: a discipline of trilliums or an infinite blanket of cherry blossoms on the Leelanau Peninsula—“I wanted to get totally enveloped those blossoms!” he says—or the stark comparability of three silver birches pitted towards the skyline.

“I was really drawn to the simplicity of [those images]. There’s a spaciousness I enjoy about them. They just take you, and you can kind of breathe easier,” says Zurick.

Still different works in e-book’s assortment are there purely for a bit enjoyable, just like the double-layout depicting the enduring Miss Uniroyal statue (aka, “Jolene”) exterior of Olean’s in Northport or the trio of kitschy pirates at a mini-golf course in Emmet County. For Zurick, a lot of these photographs strike visible curiosity for his or her irony or the curiosity they spark.

In truth, if readers take something from The Third Coast, Zurick hopes it’s a brand new understanding of and appreciation for the richness the Great Lakes include, each when it comes to topography and native custom.

“It’s an incredibly diverse landscape, and [many of us] only know a little piece of it,” he says.

“[I wanted] to present the scale, the majesty, and the diversity of these Great Lakes for folks who aren’t from the region,” Zurick provides. “They might not know about the Great Lakes at all, and [they don’t know] what they’re missing!”

Photos: Copyright David Zurick