Open Horizon

Artist Statement

The horizon is the one image that cannot be possessed. You can photograph it, but you cannot hold it still. It recedes. It changes with the hour, the season, the altitude of the eye. It is different in every direction from the same point on the water. And it refuses, absolutely, to be concluded. Every photograph of a horizon is, at its core, a record of a failed attempt to contain something that was designed by geometry itself to be uncontainable. This movement is built on that failure — and on the argument that the failure is the point.

Caribbean light is not decorative. Anyone who has stood at the edge of that water in the late afternoon, when the sun has dropped below the angle where it cuts and instead begins to spread, understands that it is a structural condition. It changes what the ocean means. It changes the color of the air between the camera and the water. It turns the horizon into a threshold between the visible and the imagined, between what is present and what the eye is convinced might be just beyond the edge of what it can reach. These images were made in that light, at that edge, in the disciplined attempt to ask what it is without answering it. The answer is not the image. The answer is the question.

There is a particular kind of openness that the horizon demands of the photographer. Most subjects offer you a geometry to work with — a face, an arch, a crowd, a shadow. The horizon offers you only extension. To photograph it honestly is to surrender the reflex toward drama and ask instead what it means to point a camera at something that is, in every literal sense, the edge of what can be known from where you are standing. I kept returning to that edge. I kept asking what it held. What it holds, I think, is not an answer. It holds the act of looking itself — which is all photography, at its most rigorous, has ever been able to offer.