The Hour of Stillness
As a child, I spent many summers on the southern Atlantic coast of France. In the late 1920s, my grandparents had settled there in the town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, where a small harbor of fishing boats is hidden behind a giant white lighthouse and stone houses still front cobblestone streets.
I learned to swim at the ocean beach, protected by dikes and tall cliffs, and caught small crabs and tiny fish in the tide pools below. The sea creatures and giant waves formed a stark contrast to the lakes and forests of Michigan, where I grew up.
My parents warned me away from the ocean cliffs where, in the slats of cliffside fences, memorials commemorated children who had fallen off the slopes. Once, it was said, lovers in a cliffside cave were overtaken by the rising tide.
But at low tide, I remember clambering down the rocky slope to explore the amazing diversity of forms, textures, and colors in the cove below. More recently, I returned there with my camera—and a tidal chart.
Twice a day, rising tides and violent waves rearrange the stones, pebbles, and sand in the cove. Each inhalation and exhalation of the sea creates new formations. A moment of stillness ensues when the tide reaches its low point. Submerged rocks are revealed and the water quiets for an hour or so until the tide starts to return.
In that stillness, I made these images over several months, noticing how the weather, sun elevation, and seasonal light evoked different feelings. I looked for ways to organize shapes, lines, and colors in the viewfinder, searching for memories among the tide pools.
To capture in detail the colors and patterns of stone and water that had fascinated me as a child, I used a range of techniques such as taking as many as thirty exposures of a scene at slightly different focus points, later combining the sharpest portions of each into a single image. I then carefully framed the images, revealed underlying colors, and removed distracting details to recreate the sense of serenity I felt during the cove’s hour of stillness.
