Lear is a play [that] contains a great deal of veiled social criticism — but it is all uttered either by the Fool, by Edgar when he is pretending to be mad, or by Lear during his bouts of madness. In his sane moments Lear hardly ever makes an intelligent remark.
George Orwell, in Lear
Rodeo Beach doesn’t give you anything for free. The Marin Headlands are raw, indifferent geology: military ruins and wind-stripped cypress, the Pacific hammering away at volcanic rock like it’s got a grudge and eternity to prosecute it. It’s the kind of place that makes you feel your own temporary condition, and that’s exactly where Lear needs to happen.
Photographing John and Ava as Lear and Cordelia out there at the edge of the continent, working through the cage speech while the actual birds wheel overhead, the camera becomes witness to something beyond documentation. Here’s Lear talking about prison while standing in the most liberating expanse of sand and tide you can imagine, except the liberation is terrifying because it offers no shelter, no mercy, just elemental honesty.
The light at that hour doesn’t apologize, doesn’t wait for you to get your exposure right. It’s got that quality of imminent withdrawal, leaving everything exposed in amber-brutal clarity. You’re chasing shadows and dying sun, trying to capture what’s already slipping away.
What makes this work is the fundamental violence of the match. Shakespeare wrote about the stripping away of everything we think protects us from the void. The Headlands are already doing that work, have been doing it for millennia. The coastline doesn’t care about your title, your legacy, your carefully constructed identity. It just erodes.
That golden hour everyone Instagram orgasms over? That’s death light. That’s the visible spectrum of ending. Through the lens, the cage isn’t just metaphor: it’s the fragile span between birth and death, consciousness flickering briefly against the infinite dark.