Arguing with Images (turns into a monologue)

Here it is.

When I began the project, I had the very vague idea of doing something with a beginning and an end. I thought about doing life to death, but I wanted to do something more specific. With that in mind, I started looking up images that evoke beginnings and endings. Sunrise and sunset were natural contenders, so those were the first ones I looked for. A surprising amount of sunrise pictures are taken on the beach, so I wondered if I could set the beach as the single environment for the photo essay. I got a picture of a sunset/sunrise (who can really tell?) with footprints in the sand, walking away from the camera. So I worked with that for a while, trying to get matching pictures that could properly end with people walking away, unseen.

Maybe a life’s story? Lots of pictures on the beach seem to mark important events in people’s lives, so I thought that might work out. Then it turned out that finding people on the beach at different points in their lives was more difficult than I thought and it might be tough to make the connection between each of them.

So, then I moved on to the life of the beach. That was doomed from the beginning and quickly turned into a much more general concept of beginning and end that could be interpreted in many different ways, but shown through the impact of people on the beach. And it’s all being shown through the beach pretty much because of the cool sunrise and sunset pictures that would frame the whole thing.

Problem #1 – People on the beach always have cheesy grins that make the picture look contrived. So I got rid of the people.

Problem #2 – Finding ways to show people were there. This was tough, seeing how I needed to do many, many image searches in order to find different things on that beach that give the impression that people had left their mark, while making sure there weren’t any cheesy, grinning people playing volleyball or dour environmentalists picking up garbage to ruin the mood. Also, good pictures of beaches without people are almost ALWAYS stock photos. I was not going to use any photos with a © or a website on them, so this meant more work.

Problem #3 – I wanted to give it a story. I really wanted to have the whole beginning and end thing work out without the project turning into a bunch of pictures of empty beaches with a sunrise and sunset, so I arranged the pictures so that the sunrise had no sign of humanity, and as the set progressed, it became more difficult to ignore the human influence, eventually ending with the footsteps walking away and then a moonlit scene with a dilapidated bit of what may have been a boat at one time.

Overall, I can see this being a commentary on the way humanity is ignoring its influence on the environment by leaving things to rot and then walking away when the fun is over. The set begins with toys and umbrellas and picnic benches, and ends with things that seem more foreign and even permanent to the environment than the things in earlier images. I had this in mind when I added the last picture, because I wanted to have something to show the beach after all the people left. That can be taken as any kind of "moving on", but I meant it more as "being forgotten".