When Stacey Massey set out to create a coffee table book with her photos of Rye, she had a sense of the city’s character and beauty.
But as she really got to know the area, her understanding of Rye deepened – as does any relationship when given the attention and appreciation.
A native of England, Massey, 47, arrived in Rye by way of San Francisco in 2015. Working in tech sales and raising two kids left her little time for her photography passion, but as her kids grew up, she was propelled by a gnawing sense that she needed something else.
“Having small children, working full time, being in a new place, I think I was just exhausted all the time, as we mothers often are,” she said. “It wasn’t even a question of ‘Let me go out for a walk, or whatever.’ It was just, ‘Let me get through the day and survive type of thing.’
“It wasn’t until I had this need to do something for me, that I picked up my camera again.”
Once she did, Massey began to see the world around her more clearly. She traveled to Alaska, Iceland, Norway, and Finland to capture the Northern Lights. The impetus for these photographic expeditions came after her kids, now 14 and 8, had started school.
With her creativity refueled, she trained her lens on Rye. Along with its schools, the city’s charm and natural beauty were a major draw when her husband’s job brought their family to New York. Still, she came to realize that she hadn’t fully appreciated her surroundings.
With the intent of compiling her photos into a book, she set out to uncover parts of Rye she had never seen. She didn’t have to go far. While the marshlands are a stone’s throw from her home on Soundview Drive, she had never set foot there until her sister, who was visiting from Wales, raved about it.
“She’s very big outdoors. She took the kids, and she’s like, ‘You have to go,’’’ said Massey. “I must say, I was so mad at myself that I hadn’t been for so many years, and now I go all the time.”
Her regular visits to the marshlands rewarded her with one of her favorite shots. On a walk with her son, Massey spotted a stately, broad-chested buck backlit amidst the woods. She stood behind a tree and pulled out her zoom.
“To me that was my ‘Nat Geo’ picture that never in a million years I thought I would get,” she said. “When I took that, it was like a moment of ‘Wow, I’ve captured this.’”
Massey’s resulting coffee table book, “Fall in Love with Rye,” invites readers to do as she did — to explore the things that in our day-to-day lives we might miss or not even know about. And, it also reveals the journey of Massey’s own love affair with what has become her hometown.
Whether Massey is capturing reflections of Playland in a frozen puddle, winter ice formations, or a lone egret wading through the Long Island Sound, inherent in each image is her connection to what she’s capturing. There’s an intimacy and unique perspective that comes through, giving the sense that she took the time to really get to know and appreciate her subject matter.
Spread throughout the book’s pages are more than 70 photos of Rye taken in every season and all types of weather. In one image, golden light dapples autumn leaves at the Nature Center while a partially camouflaged fawn at the corner of the frame locks eyes with the camera. In another, morning fog cloaks a grove of Rye Town Park’s majestic trees. In a black-and-white closeup, a goat is caught mid-pause while munching mugwort at the Marshlands meadow.
“I didn’t want to have things in there for the sake of checking off everything in Rye,” said Massey. “It had to be a picture that I loved first and foremost.”
The photographs in “Fall in Love with Rye,” were taken during 2023 and 2024. Sweeping landscapes and seascapes and Rye’s historically significant architecture and its flora and fauna, tell the town’s story, augmented by brief captions that reveal background details and historical information.
Rye’s past shows up on many of the pages. There’s the Jay Mansion seen through a foreground of dried meadow flowers, lichen covered gravestones in the Purdy Burying Ground, and the plaque on the World War I monument commemorating Rye veterans with the Square House standing softly out of focus in the background.
Also included are recent events like the Canadian wildfire smoke in June 2023, and the appearance in Rye’s sky of the Aurora Borealis in May and October 2024.
Massey said her biggest challenge was finding a premium printer for “Fall in Love with Rye” to be coffee-table worthy. She originally hoped to publish through Amazon, but was disappointed with the paper quality.
“It would have been less expensive, but it just didn’t feel like a great book,” she said. She ultimately settled on hybrid publisher Red Penguin Books.
Massey traces her interest in photography to her childhood. Her sister dubbed her the original “selfie queen,” because family prints would come back from the developer with shots of Massey, who had turned the camera on herself.
As a child in England, Massey trained as a gymnast from ages four to 17, competing in events throughout Europe and the U.S. Her gymnastic travels inspired her wanderlust and love for languages. She became fluent in French and Italian and began a career in Paris doing European sales for a tech company.
From France she moved to San Francisco with her soon-to-be husband, Ryan Carver, where the beauty of the Bay Area inspired her to start photographing after a long hiatus. By the time they moved to Rye, parenting and work were her main focus, while creative pursuits were put on the back burner.
These days she’s never without her Nikon Z6.
“My camera literally sits on the kitchen counter, because I never know when I wake up in the morning if the sky is beautiful and I’m running out the door,” she said.
Massey said photographing the world around her quiets her mind and evokes gratitude.
“When I’m out with my camera, I’m completely immersed in that experience,” she said. “I’m so much more inclined to see the beauty in everyday things, like a leaf in a puddle.”
She has no plans for another photography book, but in addition to her fulltime job as VP of sales at a media tech company, she is scheduled to photograph a charitable event in New York City and teach a photography class at Wainwright House.
Her book, a visual love letter to the place she now calls home, is available at Arcade Books and Finch & Co. for $65. It’s also available online at shopbooksdirect.com.
