All of my work here at the shore hinges on this image...
Yes I know... the camera is probably leaking light... the highlights are blown out... there are issues with grain... the sky looks like the sand... the negative has been absolutely hammered in the developer and yes, those aren’t birds in the sky it’s dust... This image is a photographer’s nightmare.
Making this image is one of the most important things that has ever happened to me. It is a hinge that changed the way I see the world... actually, if you stare at it for a minute the wave does seem a bit like a hinge of sky and land. Look at it... really look at it... it is an amazing thing... something important is happening...
It is a modern wave.
The ocean slammed this beach for eons... incomprehensible numbers of waves... a primordial rhythm... unobserved by consciousness. Ancient people lived at this beach and the waves were codified and iconified into their stories, their art, their religion... the ocean was mystical. Waves like my wave did not exist.
What is important about this wave is that it went through a camera... it is still... but it is still in a particular way.
No one could have perceived waves this way until the camera came along... slicing time... stacking light. Go into the images of waves in painting... there are still waves there... but they are different... they do not have the illusory flavor of reality. If you can find one in a Medieval painting... they are rare and they are absolutely bizarre to our consciousness.
My wave is everywhere in the modern world... I see people photographing waves at the beach all the time... there are probably enough images of waves to paper the entire surface of the oceans... but I believe that each of them is just as bizarre as the Medieval painted wave... none of them are real... they are perceptions... the photograph floats on a meniscus of illusion. I am not referring to the the traditional dialectic about photography... that has become tedious... I think it separates you from what is really happening with the images.
Something amazing is happening... I am slicing time and dividing space and stacking light with my cameras and I think I am approaching something...
suchness
lets go... I’ll show you how it happened.
