January 29, 2012 (# 1)
Medium: Photography, Nikon D3S
Date: January 29, 2012
Project/Body of Work: Souvenir Project
Photographed at the inlet in Ocean City, Maryland, this photograph follows a line of sand fencing as it cuts diagonally across the frame toward the horizon. The repeating vertical slats create a rhythmic structure, their shadows stretching across the sand in sharp contrast to the open space beyond. Footprints move alongside the fence, marking a path through the otherwise undisturbed surface.
Process Notes:
This photograph was taken during a winter walk at the Ocean City inlet while visiting my partner at the time. Both of us were photographing, and the camera was a constant presence during this period, as Souvenir had become an ongoing, unstructured process of recording.
A series of images were made that day, many of them circling similar forms: sand, fencing, horizon lines, and the stark contrast of winter light. Only a small number of those were included in Souvenir that day.
At the time, much of the internal landscape I was moving through felt desert-like—arid and exposed. These images became a way of locating that terrain externally. The sand at the inlet, stripped of its usual seasonal context, began to register less as beach and more as a kind of threshold space.
The footprints in the image were not staged or emphasized at the time of capture beyond their compositional presence. Viewed within the larger scope of Souvenir, and through the understandings that unfolded slowly in the years that followed, they now read as a kind of evidence of an inner presence I was still attempting to locate externally.
In that sense, they feel almost archaeological. Imprints left behind by something interior, registered briefly on the surface of the world.
The resulting photograph sits within Souvenir as part of a broader pattern of images where physical locations begin to carry the qualities of an internal landscape, and where those two layers (place and perception) briefly align.
Additional photographs from this day in Souvenir:
Stephen Parberry is the individual pictured in these images.
Nearby Coordinates
Perhaps significantly, these photos (and quite a few other images taken throughout the Souvenir project) were capturing places and life experiences that were foreshadowed in my 2005 dream about The Tree. This day was just one of many that unfolded during my time living in and/or visiting the Ocean City area following that dream encounter, which occurred nearly 7 years prior.
