“To photograph is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson
I keep returning to this shoreline as if it knows my name.
In the image, Del Monte Beach is less a place than a pause. The horizon is muffled, wrapped in blue-gray velvet, as though the day has decided to whisper instead of speak. The beachgoers appear in fragments, small figures suspended in a strip of amber light, like frames rescued from a half-remembered film. They walk, linger, almost dissolve. No one announces themselves. No one poses. They exist briefly, bravely, before being absorbed back into the weather.
This is how beginnings often arrive. Not with trumpets, but with fog.
The collage structure matters. The large, brooding field of blue presses down gently, a sky that has learned restraint. Within it, the smaller sequence of figures becomes precious, almost fragile. They feel like thoughts rather than people. Passing intentions. A reminder that movement does not require certainty. Compositionally, the image asks the viewer to slow down. Emotionally, it asks something harder. To admit that clarity is not a prerequisite for forward motion.
When I made this piece, I was thinking about how the new year rarely feels new. It feels layered. Old hopes still clinging like wet sand. Old doubts, too. The past year leaves its fingerprints everywhere. This image carries that truth. The textured surface, painterly and worn, refuses polish. It suggests time rather than moment. Memory rather than record. The beach becomes a threshold, a place where endings quietly change their coats and call themselves beginnings.
The figures along the waterline are not the subject. Neither is the landscape. The subject is the act of stepping forward anyway. One foot into cold water. One foot still dry. That hesitation is where I live as an artist. Every photograph I make begins there. I never fully arrive. I circle. I return. I gather fragments and stitch them together, hoping they will hum rather than shout.
There is a gentle humor here, too, though it hides behind its collar. These tiny silhouettes look earnest, almost heroic, marching along the edge of the Pacific as if they have solved something. I admire them for that. I recognize myself in their optimism. The quiet comedy of thinking we know where we are going, while the fog patiently edits our confidence.
This work is, as always, a self-portrait. Not in likeness, but in temperament. I make images the way I move through the world. Carefully. Obliquely. With a fondness for uncertainty. The collage allows me to admit that a single frame is rarely enough. Life happens in layers. Meaning arrives in overlaps. Beginnings do not erase what came before. They carry it, slightly rearranged.
As the year turns, this image feels like an invitation rather than a declaration. To walk. To look. To accept that the horizon may not reveal itself today. To find comfort in motion itself.
If there is a promise here, it is a modest one. Keep going. Even when the light is thin. Especially then.
Artist Statement
My work explores photography as an emotional and psychological landscape rather than a descriptive one. I build images the way memory works, in fragments, layers, and quiet collisions. Each photograph functions as a self-portrait, not of my appearance, but of my internal state. I am drawn to ambiguity, to places where meaning is suggested rather than explained. Through painterly textures and cinematic sequencing, I aim to create visual poems that invite viewers to project their own histories and hopes into the frame. My images are not answers. They are thresholds.