When I first started photographing on the beach, I made boring photographs - lots of boring photographs. In fact, I have an amazing collection of dreadful boring grand landscape photographs made on the beach. Most of them suffer from a problem my friend David Clarridge and I have dubbed "BSS", for Blank Sky Syndrome. It doesn't matter how much you want to make grand landscapes with Ansel Adams skies on the coast of Oregon and Washington - those photographs are simply never there, because it's simply not that sort of place.
It wasn't until I started to deliberately exclude the sky and avoid the 'grand landscape' that I started getting decent photographs - and it was in the process of making what I'll call 'intimate landscapes' that I started to understand the beach well enough to make broader scale photographs that conveyed a real sense of place.
In the process, I learned to love the intimate landscape - a photograph that can say a great deal about a place by implication, the way just a few words in a poem can convey a much broader idea than the words directly express.
| On the beach, we tend to extend our attention out from the beach toward the ocean. It's often rewarding, particularly at low tide, to walk out to the surf line and look back. We tend to think of the beach as 'rocks, sand, and ocean', but it's also 'rocks, sand, and trees'. |
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| Much of what I experience on the beach is all detail - the way the receding tide scours the sand away from every exposed rock to form tide pools, the way the tide pools connect and drain by little streams of water that leave flow patterns in the sand, the way the sand movement has polished the surface of some of the rocks. |
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| The angle at which you can pile sand - the 'angle of repose' - depends on how much moisture is trapped in the sand. Wet sand can have a nearly vertical angle of repose, and will form these beautiful flow patterns between vertical walls, especially where the rate of flow of the water drops off. |
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| Not every pattern on the beach is natural. Some other beach visitor left this wonderful little tower hidden in a tangle of driftwood. I don't know who it was, but I felt like they'd left a present just for me. |
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| Any little hollow or depression that's below the high tide line will accumulate a little collection of things. |
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| Morley Baer's son, Joshua, told me that Morley
often would look at something and remark "I think I need to do
something about that", meaning he felt the urge to make a
photograph. I looked at these trees a number of times, each time thinking "I need to do something about those trees". Fortunately, I acquired a lens long enough to capture them before they vanished, blown down in a big winter storm. |
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