Something has just been taken away, and this is what remains: a white field studded with black stubs, each stalk cut or snapped a breath before the shutter and still standing where it fell. I look and I am late; whatever green this was is already elsewhere. The pale ground, chalk or salt or bleached sand, keeps the score, a scatter of dark strokes and their small shadows, like a page after the words have been erased.
What holds me is not the pattern but one thing inside it: a single stub near the centre casts a shadow longer than the rest, a small clock hand telling an hour I cannot read. Around it, pale clumps of seed or foam sit like punctuation, and the dark strokes lean every way at once, some upright, some already lying down, so that the whole scatter seems to be dispersing even as it is held still. That one long shadow undoes the field’s composure, insisting time passes on a surface that looks eternal.
I am told it is called grass, though grass is exactly what is missing; what the picture shows is the aftermath, the stubble and the light. It is a gelatin silver print toned with selenium, made the year after the negative, and selenium is why the blacks hold their weight against so much white without dissolving. Saula, who photographs and founded the gallery that shows him, refuses colour here for a reason, since colour would name a place and a season, and he wants instead the bare grammar of mark, ground and passing time.
Something has just been taken away, and this is what remains: a white field studded with black stubs, each stalk cut or snapped a breath before the shutter and still standing where it fell. I look and I am late; whatever green this was is already elsewhere. The pale ground, chalk or salt or bleached sand, keeps the score, a scatter of dark strokes and their small shadows, like a page after the words have been erased.
What holds me is not the pattern but one thing inside it: a single stub near the centre casts a shadow longer than the rest, a small clock hand telling an hour I cannot read. Around it, pale clumps of seed or foam sit like punctuation, and the dark strokes lean every way at once, some upright, some already lying down, so that the whole scatter seems to be dispersing even as it is held still. That one long shadow undoes the field’s composure, insisting time passes on a surface that looks eternal.
I am told it is called grass, though grass is exactly what is missing; what the picture shows is the aftermath, the stubble and the light. It is a gelatin silver print toned with selenium, made the year after the negative, and selenium is why the blacks hold their weight against so much white without dissolving. Saula, who photographs and founded the gallery that shows him, refuses colour here for a reason, since colour would name a place and a season, and he wants instead the bare grammar of mark, ground and passing time.