Christine Back grew up here on the Cape and tries to capture moments of mystery that she relished as a child. Look at one of her shore photos, and a million questions bubble up. Are those boys, captured in medium format in the 1990s on the Wildwoods boardwalk, friends, lovers, or rivals? Who is that woman wearing a superhero cape in the middle of a rainstorm, and why is she headed into traffic in the middle of Cape May’s busiest street?
Christine spent many lazy days wandering around the Cape looking for something to do. There’s a stereotype, anchored in truth, that local kids get into trouble during the off-season. For Christine, that meant wandering the streets like a ghost, looking for things to photograph.
Her weapon of choice is the Hasselblad 500CM, a film camera that shoots square photos. “It’s the one that went to the moon, the one that took the pictures of the earth,” she said.
She grew up without a lot of money, and her family moved around a lot: from Court House, to North Cape May, then to Cape Island, with many stints in Wildwood. She found a love of photography flipping through old photographs at Whale’s Tale, a long-standing souvenir and toy shop in Cape May.
“There wasn’t a lot going on down here, and there was no internet!” Sometimes, she bumped into zany local characters who became her obsession.

One of these people was Danny ‘the King’ Tierson, pictured with swagger in front of the Cape May ACME in what Back guesses is the late 1980s. Danny, who suffered fetal alcohol syndrome, was a dishwasher for The Pilot House on the Washington Street Mall. The owner ran into Danny, hauling groceries with an old Radio Flyer wagon, and offered him a job as a dishwasher.
The staff loved him. On his best days, it felt like the whole town did. Danny never traveled; he blew most of his money on baseball cards. One year, the Pilot House staff saved up to fly Danny to Graceland, Tennessee. Danny lived above The Pilot House, and he had an unpretentious magnetism that drew people to him. During one of Christine’s first encounters with Danny, he draped a Lei necklace around her neck. “You just got Leid by the king,” he told her with a smile.
Her photos aren’t staged, even if the scenes look deliberate and elaborate. Her photos of Danny were taken on his errand runs, when he agreed to let Christine follow him around. Some of her best works resemble Gregory Crewdson photos, a famous Brooklyn photographer who captures American malaise with intricate sets and light crews. But Christine is a one-man show who sometimes waits for hours for somebody to step into the perfect pose.

She waited all day for a shot of another local character, Suzanne Muldowney, a performer who never missed a parade.
“It was 1992, the day of the Independence Day parade in Cape May. It was rained out, but I knew Suzanne was going to walk anyway. I ran up the stairs of the Marquis de Lafayette, and I waited and waited and waited, but I finally got that shot,” Christine said. “For me, the harder it is to take a photo, the better it is.”
Christine used to be nervous about snapping photos of folks without their permission. Her “ball boys” photo was one of the first times she left her comfort zone; she saw these two young men on the Wildwoods boardwalk, employees at a carnival game, and had to get the shot. They would lose their casual slouch if spoken to.
“They were those guys who would holler at you on the boardwalk. It looks like they’re recapping the night before, or maybe making some plans. And just the way they’re holding the baseballs…” The mystery gives the photo its edge.
“Now, everybody has a camera in their hand,” she said, talking about how the average person’s relationship to photographs – and having their photo taken – has changed in her decades of shooting.




Before smartphones, she said that most people were glad to have their photo taken. They didn’t ask what the photo was for, if they could see it, or if they could be tagged in a social media post. Photos took days or weeks to be processed. Now, she says that people are always asking if they can see the image first, as if it’ll make them famous.
“And people have gotten way too posey!”
Christine has created a large portfolio of Cape May County photos across her life, most of them in square, black-and-white format. They were featured in a Chinese publication, Vision Magazine, in 2010. But her photos had a limited audience back home. That has changed lately, thanks in large part to a photo exhibition at Givens in Cape May, where her prints are for sale.
Pointing at her photo of Danny by the ACME, Christine said, “I sold two prints in 40 years of this photo. Givens has sold dozens,” she said.
Christine’s photos are great because they capture the whimsy and mystery of the shore without feeling canned. They aren’t generic shore scenes that might populate a staged rental home. The photos feel spontaneous and often show unsexy scenes of, say, an office building in Cape May Point or a quiet bedroom at an old nunnery. They capture the loneliness of a Cape May winter, the joy of a Wildwood summer.
See more of Christine’s work at www.christineback.com. Buy one of her prints at Givens on the Washington Street Mall.
Contact the author, Collin Hall, at chall@cmcherald.com