Same spot.
Off a few increasingly small roads twisting along the St. George peninsula is the single dusty parking spot for visitors to Clark Island. You have to walk in to the island interior, passing through a lobsterman's front yard early on, and at the far end of the island is a brackish quarry fed from below by a rift in the seawall. It took a long time to figure out exactly what it was that was so captivating about this place, and finally I noticed it; the stark play between the abandoned cut granite and the frenzy of nature surrounding it, these immense, irregular but still severe geometries playing off the wilderness. Planes of light in the dark lattice of conifers.
It is easy to just look around and have your brain encode the idea of rocks/boulders/stone until you pause and realize how entirely unnatural the forms are. You might recognize the second photograph from last summer; it is still my favorite image to date, and I couldn't figure out why until recently. It is the hushed culmination of what I'd been photographing since the first moment I picked up a camera, turning to the remnants left by activity. A glass of water, half finished in the sun. A pair of glasses left behind during a summer swim. The still-charged traces of life.
It's what I see in these heaps of granite. Hard generations of families carving and blasting at the earth. The velocity and muscle of industrialization, the durable ghost trail which it has left behind.
In short, I've been a little obsessed with the place lately; the recognition of what makes it so wonderful has got me working on a new project, the first evidence of which is in the earlier post. More soon.
