Wind, 2017.How much of this picture is sand, and how much is air?
Arm and Sea, 2017.Late, low light comes in from the right and settles the whole sky into a single pale grey wash, brightest where it grazes the edge of the frame and dimming softly toward the left.
Baobab Poem, 2017.The trunks advance and then slip out of register, each baobab doubling, tripling, until one tree becomes a pale colonnade of itself.
Baobab Road, 2017.They reach sideways rather than up, these pale baobab trunks flinging themselves low and horizontal across a mound of cracked earth as if caught mid-crawl toward the camera.
Bird, 2017.Whose hand is this, laid over the weathered pole as lightly as a bird settling on a wire?
Boy, 2017.Roy DeCarava argued, in prints of great tenderness, that dark skin deserved to be printed dark — that shadow was not a problem to be corrected but a dwelling place.
Family, 2017.A torn edge runs down the middle of the frame, the deckled rip of paper or of light, and it divides the picture the way a wall divides a yard: on one side a child's face surfacing from shadow, on the…
Fruit, 2017.A shadow slips out from beneath the fruit and reaches across the sand, tapering to a dark point that seems still to be moving even as the shutter fixes it.
Giant, 2017.Small beads of sweat catch the sun across the bridge of the nose, and those bright specks, hardly larger than the film’s own grain, tell us the essential fact: this is a portrait made under real…
Girl, 2017.The flat marine light that hangs over this coast is the picture’s actual subject, a soft even grey that erases the sky’s seams and turns the far sea into a single dark ribbon along the base of the…
Grass, 2017.No sky, no horizon, no scale. The frame is taken up entirely by ground: a pale flat surface, chalk or salt or bleached sand, seen from just above and slightly to the side.
Homage, 2017.Not one face is offered here. The photograph gives us five children from behind, their wet backs beaded and gleaming as they run across bright sand toward a pale seam of surf, and it withholds every…
Hope, 2017.What is she watching, so far above us that her chin lifts clear of the horizon and only sky will do for a backdrop?
Love, 2017.Two figures, no taller than a fingernail, stand in the top right corner, and everything else is grey.
Lucky Charm, 2017.A cord, a few small carved objects, a wrist of worn silver: the whole apparatus of protection in this photograph would fit inside a closed hand.
Mirage, 2017.A mirage is geography’s most candid lie: the desert offering water, the summer road offering a lake that recedes exactly as fast as you approach.
Morning Light, 2017.The sun is a celebrity: best met through an intermediary.
My Dream, 2017.A small building stands alone on flat pale sand.
Nude, 2017.The nude has spent centuries being displayed, arranged for a viewer’s pleasure and framed as availability; here almost nothing of that inheritance survives except a curve of bare back and a wet dark…
Ocean, 2017.We are set down at the water’s edge and given almost nothing to hold: a soft grey sky, a darker sea, and between them a horizon so dissolved in haze that it barely qualifies as a line.
Pure, 2017.Her face is exactly what the photograph withholds, and the withholding is the whole transaction.
Row, 2017.The back tells the truth the face is busy hiding.
Sand Dune, 2017.Read the sand and it looks like cursive: long looping lines the wind has scored across the dune, parallel strokes that swell and taper like a signature repeated down a page.
Sand Flow, 2017.Edward Weston went to the dunes at Oceano and came back with sand that looked like flesh, like polished bone, like anything but sand.
Sand Hills, 2017.So fine-grained is the gray of this print, so evenly worked, that it keeps threatening to become a drawing: graphite rubbed into soft paper with the side of a thumb.
Seabed, 2017.Begin with one small tuft, a single dark whisk of dried algae combed flat against the pale silt as if a brush had swept past and lifted.
Settlement, 2017.The bottom two thirds of the square is a dune.
The Dance, 2017.A moment earlier the dog had not yet drawn level with the horns; a moment later it will have slipped past into the shadowed end of the alley, the encounter gone.
Three, 2017.A moment before this, the wind was still working the ridge; now it has withdrawn, and the sand holds three bands of grey as if they had always been there.
Time, 2017.Long before anyone thought to stand here, the sea was laying down this rock in patient horizontal bands, one thin layer at a time, and now a pair of sand-dusted feet has parked itself on top of the…
Wedding, 2017.Shot from low and into the light, so that the man is only a silhouette: a shoulder, an arm, a hand, the rest cut away by the top of the frame.
White, 2017.The whitest thing in the frame is not the sky but the lather, a thick foam of soap sliding in bright rivulets down a dark bent head and pooling at the jaw.
X, 2017.There came a point in photography’s long argument with abstraction when the medium realized it could make an X out of almost nothing, two feathered strands crossing against a white sky, and let that…