When it comes to making things, I’m drawn to systems over routines. As a craftsman, my default system is tradition. It’s simply easier to keep one foot in the patterns of the past, especially if tradition is viewed as a very malleable template, a set of parameters as opposed to outcomes. Studying the grain of wood tells me just how best to put it to use.
I’ve been trying to make pictures the same way. Walking the beaches each morning I devote about as much time to studying the patterns of waves, sand, light and fog as I have to studying wood. I want my pictures to capture the ‘grain’ of these temporal interactions, which I distill into succinct categories depending upon the conditions of the day. I think of every wave as a cant cut from a fresh log, and relish the immediacy and simplicity of reporting on its rawness, everything reduced to just being present with camera in hand. Making pictures should be like catching a fish, or catching a wave.