Tyler Haughey

"I’ve spent the last two years documenting the Mid-century Modern motels of the Wildwoods, a group of shore towns on a five-mile island in southern New Jersey. Built in the ’50s and ’60s and virtually unchanged, they form the largest concentration of postwar resort architecture in the US. As a native of the Jersey Shore, I’ve always been interested in the coast’s history and buildings, and when I happened upon the Wildwoods one winter, I felt like I’d travelled back in time."

"Photographer Tyler Haughey compares visiting the motels of Wildwood, New Jersey on the off-season to wandering onto a film set after the cast and crew has departed. For nine months of the year, the lights are switched off, the windows are shuttered, and the doors are locked.

"The now-iconic doo-wop motels of Wildwood, North Wildwood, and Wildwood Crest popped up along the New Jersey coast in the mid-20th century, when post-war American families could hop in their cars and escape to someplace magical."

"Worldwide, the words Jersey Shore have become synonymous with bulky guys and busty girls partying hard and shaming themselves in so many different ways (thank you, MTV). For the non-American, Jersey Shore is actually the common name used for the coast of the US State of New Jersey, a popular summer destination since the 1950s, when many new resorts were constructed to host the influx of tourists. American photographer Tyler Haughey’s beautiful series Ebb Tide captures the unique architecture and mood of these resorts during the off season, when the tourists are gone and the motels sprinkled with snow."

"The Wildwoods, a group of small shore towns situated on a five-mile-long barrier island along the southern New Jersey coastline, are home to one of the most important architectural collections of the 20th century. They contain a trove of midcentury modern motels that make up the largest concentration of postwar resort architecture in the United States. These motels remain fully functioning and virtually unchanged since their original construction, in many cases over fifty years ago."

"Malibu, Sahara, Monaco—it sounds like an exotic world tour, but you can go to all three in New Jersey! These mid-century modern motels named for sunny locales pepper a five-mile stretch of the Jersey shore, just north of Cape May, known as Wildwood. Tyler Haughey first visited the area one January, after the throngs of people had packed up their beach towels and dusted the sand off their feet, leaving these architectural gems to sit lonely and shuttered."

"Five years ago, Tyler Haughey, then a student at Drexel University, was driving along the coast when he happened to pass through the Wildwoods. A Jersey Shore native, he’d heard about the Wildwoods but had never been to any of them before. It was February, and the motels were deserted, but he found them captivating, and so he stopped to photograph some of them.

“'It felt like I’d happened upon an abandoned film set,' he said."