This was shot last summer when Aimee and I traveled up the coast of California from San Francisco to the Oregon border and back to Oakland. I believe this was he stroll along the path up to the Point Reyes Lighthouse. Everything was stunning.
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The calm and swaddling fog belied the strength of the storm now withdrawing its harrow from the sea cliff. Yet the ocean itself still struggled. The waves below thrashed jagged rocks, sending up spews of enthusiastic white water to intermingle with the gravid mists. The beach, dunes and bordering marshlands had hurriedly transformed into features of sea floor, barely visible in the persistent churn.
Further inland, freshwater fish clustered belly-up in hybrid tide pools, capitulating to the torrent of brack and brine which had poured into their pond, with the resulting effluent forcing meadow grasses into a seaweed-sway. Here no cricket chirps. There are no chastising calls from black-capped chickadees, nor squirrels to squawk back. Here where the tibias and fibulas of tree branches litter the muck and randomly stab the swirling snarls of winterberry and buckthorn, the only sounds are infrequent gurgles from the newly deluged gopher holes.
But this was not a bad day. Nor was it a typical one, if only for the reason that we had travelled beyond climatic conventions to a world of few weatherly habits. The growing ocean would continue to phagocytose its shores, erasing aged demarcations. Lazy hills become long sandbars. Repurposed cliffs gruffly greet the sea, their ledges on the precipice of extinction. Upon these embankments, we sashay defiantly, inhaling the damp, low sky into our lungs. The trees do not lean toward us in admiration. They cling to the edge with all their might. Like giant mangroves, they begin to equilibrate salt water in order to survive.
Composition is everything. It’s the only thing. Composition is the placement of the walker. Composition is the disruption of the composition by mad trees laying themselves down. The triangles and implied triangles of this photo are astounding. The light, absent from the trees, brings the pathway to life. The walker’s head tilts with the trees, as though infected by their madness. Art creates a world. And some of my favorite photographs come complete with a diagram on how to fold up that world and put it into your chest pocket. This one might even make a paper airplane.
This photo is barely there, barely more than some simple shapes cut out of black construction paper with dull scissors. This photo resists being seen, but then the eye breaks through it like a spoon through crème brulee… and finds itself immersed in composition, as awed with the view as that mysterious walker. I love where he or she is, in a cave of light, with his own little landscape behind him, but moving into the landscape in front of him. He is as delicate as the rest of the image. I can imagine the eye of the DPC voter crashing down in search of sharp detail, shattering everything like porcelain. No, this photo demands a gentle eye, moving slowly, so slowly it doesn’t seem to be moving at all.
I saw once trees like this, in Provence, France - I wish I knew more about them. Is the image desaturated? It's at the unsteady border of B&W - the dynamic composition is winning
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