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.
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Sand isn't homogenous stuff; it's composed of lots of different
little particles. Often, different sized particles are
made of different stuff, and are different colors. Flowing water tends to separate the different sized particles, and it can produce beautiful, barely visible patterns in places like this, where little shell fragments have disturbed the laminar flow of the water. |
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| Sand isn't the only material on the beach that forms patterns. Streams that empty into the ocean across the beach often get scalloped bottoms from the flowing water, and those scalloped stream bottoms often set up standing wave patterns in the water that persist for minutes at a time before something disturbs the stasis and the pattern vanishes, to be replace by another one in a short while. |
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| Water flowing across the beach usually produces a pattern like this, but it's often so subtle that it's hard to see. When the lighting is from just the right direction, though, they can really stand out. |
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| Sand patterns are always embedded in a larger context that creates the conditions that form them. In this case, the sand bar that formed around the rocks has changed the water flow enough to carve these patterns into the sand. |
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