When I firsted started photographing on the beach, I made boring photographs - lots of boring photographs. In fact, I 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 the process of making what I'll call 'intimate landscapes' that started to understand the coast 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.
|
Sometimes, photographs are literally hidden in plain sight.
When I saw these rocks protruding above the sand, I was very
excited despite the horrible, flat , almost directionless
lighting. Still, I made an exposure, because what you see
on the beach one day is almost always gone the next. Even
with carefully controlled development, an expressive print was a
challenge.
But the photograph says a lot about the process that creates (and recreates) the beach. |
 |
| Everywhere you look on the beach, the patterns you see tell you things about the proccesses that form them. The process that forms ripples in the bottom of tide pools is the same process that produces ripples on the surface of dry sand - it's just moving air, instead of moving water. |
 |
| Everywhere water and sand interact, the patterns tell a story - in this case, it's all about water flowing from under a gravel bed running into a stretch of sand the tide left in ripples. |
 |
| Some beaches are gravel up high on the beach, and sand down near the surf line. In this case, water from an stream percolates through the gravel bed, and emerges to carve these patterns into the sand. |
 |
| Sometimes it takes a little understanding to get a pattern to reveal itself photographically. There wasn't much tonal separation between the water and the gravel. But the water was covered with little windblown ripples, and using a long exposure turns it from a galaxy of little specular highlights into a creamy surface that separates nicely from the gravel and sand. |
 |