On Tim Coy’s last trip aboard the ferry Islander, he reached for his camera. “The emptiness of the sound sharpened my sense of loss in an old friend’s demise,” he says. In a photo taken from the passenger deck, that emptiness is heightened by the juxtaposition of tourist binoculars aimed toward a lone green buoy in the water.

“One of my big influences is Edward Hopper,” Tim explains, referring to the American realist painter whose work, despite its simple and often stark composition, conveyed strong emotional undercurrents. “I’m...sort of attracted to the theme of loneliness.”

Tim first connected with Hopper during his college years. “His images made me think of the Vineyard,” says Tim, who often summered on West Chop and now splits his time between here and Savannah, Georgia.

On-Island he tends to focus his lens seaside and at night, often in downtown Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs.

Tim appreciates the impact of a single figure, such as the seal on the magazine’s cover. Then there’s a black-and-white shot of his mother standing in the doorway of an old Quansoo shack around 1970, when Tim was about twenty. It’s the darker mood of that photo that appeals to him, he says. “I am drawn to the gritty film-noir atmosphere of the scene.”