Ocean Beach

The liminal interface of seawater, sand, and sky inspires a construct of consciousness, the space in which everything appears, the light by which everything is seen. 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 fifteen-year-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 dance, can only be seen when arrested and confined within the two-dimensional frame of a photograph. With that in mind, I can combine two techniques to achieve a singular illusion. One freezes time; the other melts it. Artists share their vision by creating windows. A photograph is a window left open. To look through it is to sustain a lucid dream, an awareness that transcends language. Like a mirage, for example, it transcends the boundaries of reality; it is real enough to be defined in a dictionary, technically a refracted pattern of light. But if it looks like a body of water, can you measure its depth?