Beachscapes
Ocean Beach, San Francisco
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The liminal interface of seawater, sand, and sky inspires a construct of consciousness, the space in which everything appears. It beckons my camera.
Throughout my career, I have focused primarily on portraits, still lifes of people. That, in a nutshell, is how I define portraiture. Once in a while, I’d point my lens at a landscape, seldom before at the sea.
I used to think of the beach as a background. Now it’s a theme. With a fresh eye, the upshot of my long hiatus from photography, and given the proximity of my Outer Sunset neighborhood to Ocean Beach in San Francisco, I’ve discovered a rhythmic confluence of color and time that pulls me in like a riptide. As evanescent as it is powerful, this phenomenon can only be depicted with the unblinking eye of a camera adjusted to thwart its mechanical intent to stop time.
As paradoxical as it might seem, the most visually appealing characteristics of movement, for me, notwithstanding a live dance performance, can only be seen when arrested and confined within the two-dimensional frame of a photograph. With this in mind, I can combine two photographic techniques to achieve a singular effect. One freezes time; the other melts it. There is no other way to see this illusion short of psychedelics.
One way artists share their vision, their mind’s eye, is to create a photograph. A photograph is a window left open. To look through it is to sustain a lucid dream. Like a mirage, what you see is real enough to describe. It is real enough to be defined in a dictionary. It looks like a body of water. But can you measure its depth?
