“We do not remember days, we remember moments.”
— Cesare Pavese
The Golden Gate Bridge, blurred and ethereal, rises like a memory half-remembered, and within its quiet embrace floats a fragment of another time. We thought we would remember everything. The sound of our names called out across the waves, the way the sand clung to our legs like time refusing to let go. But memory, I’ve learned, is not a vault—it is a tide. It recedes even as we chase it.
Where the Past Walks Beside Us
There is a beach I return to often. It exists somewhere just beneath the waking world, veiled in a kind of soft forgetting. The bridge looms there—timeless, monumental—its towers rising like ancient sentinels over a city that changes faster than memory can hold. But the shoreline? It is always different. And always the same.
In this image, a sliver of time floats like a relic. A tiny, grainy scene—a group of beachgoers mid-step, as if someone long ago paused a reel of home footage just here, just now. They appear inside a box that seems both physical and spectral, like a memory too fragile to exist without containment. The rest of the world—the bridge, the hills, the sky—is blurred, as if softened by the fog of forgetting.
This is how memories visit us. Not in high resolution or coherent narrative, but in fragments. Was it 1994 or 1977? Were we happy or pretending to be? The mind edits, erases, and distorts. Still, some images remain—sanded by time but impossible to discard. And we build our lives around these echoes.
This artwork is not merely a depiction of place—it is an invocation. It asks: What if every photograph were not just an image, but a ghost? What if our cities are haunted not by spirits, but by the countless invisible footprints we left in the sand?
The scene is not only a meeting place between land and water, but also between past and present. And in that blurry in-between—where joy once walked and silence now follows—lies a chance to remember, or perhaps, to let go.
Artist Statement
In creating works like this, I often reflect on how visual memory intersects with our care for the earth. The more we forget, the more we lose. Not only people and faces, but shorelines, species, and silence itself. If an image can hold a place in our hearts, then it can hold space for it in the world. Photography, when wielded as a poetic artifact, can remind us not only of what was, but of what could still be preserved.
Every blurred mountain in this image, every hazy wave, asks us: What legacy will we leave when the tide of memory pulls back? The image becomes an environmental prayer—subtle, symbolic, and unresolved.