Rock Art
Some photos look like paintings, and some paintings look like photos. In either case, realism isn’t, really.
Rock portraits are still a staple of my trips to the central coast. These are bare geological beings dressed by wind and waves, tides, and weather. Honeycombed tafoni. Squiggles, swirls, doodles, toothy triangles, glowing gradations, mysterious messages, and a galaxy of colors—some soft, some startling. The closer you look, the more you see.
On a cool, cloudy day in January or February, Helen would drop me at Weston Beach in Point Lobos, and at first I'd see nothing…like “What am I doing here?” Then a tiny detail would catch my eye, and I'd start focusing in…and next thing you know it's three hours later, it's getting dark, and Helen's back—and I've moved maybe fifteen feet!
I love this kind of "micro-exploring." I don't strafe with the camera, I just wander and look, look, look for energy, emotion, and balance in an area—often with the aid of my viewing card (see “Frame Your World”)—and then let the camera draw me in further. The eyecups of my viewfinders are all smashed in by the sheer number of hours I've spent pressed up against them. It’s all a matter of feel, and it’s all personal. But THIS person disappears.
The best conditions for shooting beach art are hard to peg. It helps to have a low tide, of course, preferably ebbing, and I like it cloudy or foggy and mostly dry to preserve the softer colors. Maybe right on the edge of storming. Neutral, not the warm jazziness and shadows of sunset. So, I’ve been skunked many times by sunny days, and other times I’ve had to run and hole up in the truck or a park bathroom while showers bust loose. Along with my camera gear, I’ll bring some water, a Clif bar or two, and a jacket and fingerless gloves for wind and weather.
Most of my earliest rock portraits, like ‘Weston squiggles,’ shown above, were made on film with a Hasselblad and either an 80mm or 120mm macro lens, and always on a tripod. These days I mostly use a digital Sony and a pair of Canon tilt-shift macro lenses—50mm and 90mm—with Metabones adapters. Occasionally, I’ll pick a wider or longer lens for just a bit of “sweep” or compression. (And sometimes you can’t get to precisely where you’d like to be.)
The abstract expressionist painters of the New York School thought of the canvas as “an arena in which to act.” As a dialogue of discovery. A flat frame with no escape route. Producing objects that don’t look like objects. I’ve been lucky to view their work up close at places like MOMA in New York, SFMOMA, the Chicago Institute of Art, and the Peggy Guggenheim museum in Venice.
I don't think of these echoes while I'm working with the camera, but I've noticed them later. Like those self-styled “irascibles,” I often strive for non-figurative flatness and “all-over composition.” And I definitely view the work as a dialogue, which I want to experience as-is, now—in the viewfinder—not by cropping later. The “subject” is something that emerges from the emotional push and pull of colors and shapes within the frame. As Barnett Newman said: “Just as I affect the canvas, so does the canvas affect me.”
But in the case of rock art, TIME is the artist. And while we photographers don’t make these canvases, we do discover and reveal them—and I think that search can be, by itself, a small act of creation, too. It’s all about the finding and feeling and framing. Searching for what Harold Rosenberg called abstract art’s “elemental impact” amidst the elements themselves. Talk about foundations.
California’s rock art is everywhere, from coastal sandstones to Sierra granite and onward to the eastside’s metamorphics. I’ve been on this path for years, and I’m just getting started. So are the rocks.
By Scott Atkinson
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