They asked me to document a site specific performance piece called Out of Water at Fort Funston for the Performance Studies international conference. Fort Funston… where the cliffs give up and the Pacific takes over. Helen Paris and Caroline Wright had assembled the whole apparatus: commissioned sound scores, UK sopranos, singers and swimmers spread across windblasted sand searching some fictive horizon for someone lost at sea. But here’s what my camera found instead of concept: just bodies getting smaller against that Northern California gray, that light that turns everything into memory before it even happens. The ocean doesn’t care about someone’s artist statement. It doesn’t traffic in metaphor or theory or Performance Studies International credentials. These performers, whatever ritualized desperation they’re enacting, they’re just mammals at the continent’s edge doing what we all do when confronted with vastness. Looking. Searching. Singing into the void like it might answer back. My images don’t oversell any of this. They just show you what’s there: humans, sand, water, the implacable fact of standing at the boundary of what we know. The bodies look small because they are small.
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