Nearly all of this picture is a single tone, a grey with green in it, the color of sea glass gone cloudy, and its problem is how to make that tone count. The fog has swallowed sky, hill and distance without leaving a seam. What remains to draw with is modest: a wet road keeping its double yellow line at the left edge, a chain-link fence diminishing toward nowhere, and one pale upright figure beside it.
The fence does the drawing. It is the one line the weather could not dissolve, and it gives the eye its only measure of depth. Against it stands the woman in her slip-pale dress, blurred past identification, arms held a little out from her sides as if balancing on something we cannot see. She reads less like a person photographed than like someone the fog is in the middle of delivering. Photography has always described weather better than it explains people; this picture manages both by declining to finish either.
The photographer works from the San Francisco Bay Area, an Ohioan by birth, and much of his best-known landscape work is made through the window of his car, in weather most photographers wait out. He numbers his pictures rather than naming them, a bookkeeping that suits their reticence. Prints are held by SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney. The archival pigment print earns its keep in that grey: what reads as emptiness on a screen resolves, on paper, into a long scale of close values. The fog turns out to be full of small decisions; that is how a picture earns its emptiness.
Nearly all of this picture is a single tone, a grey with green in it, the color of sea glass gone cloudy, and its problem is how to make that tone count. The fog has swallowed sky, hill and distance without leaving a seam. What remains to draw with is modest: a wet road keeping its double yellow line at the left edge, a chain-link fence diminishing toward nowhere, and one pale upright figure beside it.
The fence does the drawing. It is the one line the weather could not dissolve, and it gives the eye its only measure of depth. Against it stands the woman in her slip-pale dress, blurred past identification, arms held a little out from her sides as if balancing on something we cannot see. She reads less like a person photographed than like someone the fog is in the middle of delivering. Photography has always described weather better than it explains people; this picture manages both by declining to finish either.
The photographer works from the San Francisco Bay Area, an Ohioan by birth, and much of his best-known landscape work is made through the window of his car, in weather most photographers wait out. He numbers his pictures rather than naming them, a bookkeeping that suits their reticence. Prints are held by SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney. The archival pigment print earns its keep in that grey: what reads as emptiness on a screen resolves, on paper, into a long scale of close values. The fog turns out to be full of small decisions; that is how a picture earns its emptiness.