The sea is never still, the whipping of the wind, the rise and fall of the tides, and the play of sunlight across the sand mean everything is always in flux. When making the Lost Horizon photographs, I too was in constant motion, physically panning my camera across the waves until they dissolved and turned to swaths of pure colour and light. I chased the clouds as they danced overhead.
I was born on the shoreline, and I return to the coast when I felt lost, uncertain, and adrift. I walk for miles, even in the dead of winter, breathing in the salt air and listening to the crashing of the waves. Just as the water reflects the sky above, the landscape becomes a mirror for my own thoughts and imaginings. I came here searching for something, an answer to a question I hadn’t yet asked, emerging like a distant ship just over the horizon.
Generations of artists before me have stared toward the horizon and even into the heavens, sometimes to the point of obsession. John Constable painted the clouds so fervently that he made up a word to describe the practice: skying . It was with “great excitement” that Alfred Stieglitz set about photographing the clouds, creating intentionally disorienting images in which left and right and up and down became indistinguishable. In some of my images, the horizon line anchors us firmly to the ground. But in others, our eyes are almost completely unmoored, as in Stieglitz’s cloud pictures, as the movement of the waves and the camera makes it impossible to distinguish where the water ends and the sky begins. The sea is powerful, often violent, but in these pictures, the waves are as light and as delicate as air.
In that sense, these are photographs of space between the known and the unknown. Similarly, I made the pictures at sunset, at the moment when the clarity of day fades into the mysteries of night. I had about 30 minutes of ethereal, unpredictable light that changed from one second to the next, and then seemingly in a flash, it would be over and all would be dark.
Alone on the beach for miles at a stretch, I made hundreds of pictures as the sun inched toward the horizon. Like Constable, I became deeply attuned to the direction of the wind, the changing of the weather, or the coming of a storm. And like Stieglitz, I felt the adrenaline rush that comes with trying to harness nature’s whims, first failing, then succeeding at capturing just the right forms at just the right moment in just the right light, before they disappeared forever.
Each exposure was about ½ to one second, and although I learned how to move my camera to get the effect I wanted, much was still left to chance. Many of the images were happy accidents, surprises gifted to me by the water, wind, and sun. The motion blur in the photographs means that they aren’t strictly representational. This isn’t how the ocean looks to our eyes but how it might look in a dream or memory. Long after we’ve left the beach, we remember the pink blush of a fleeting cloud, the icy grey of the choppy sea, or a reflection on the water brighter and more brilliant than the sky itself and everything else falls away.
I haven’t found whatever it was I was searching for, but here at the water’s edge, a sense of peace and tranquility comes over me. The symphony of the waves and the vastness of the sky, the same sky that Constable, Stieglitz, and so many others once stood under, envelop me until I feel as weightless as the clouds and as infinite as the ocean. These photographs are a love letter to the in-between spaces, and a testament to the beauty of getting lost.
