Not one face is offered here. The photograph gives us five children from behind, their wet backs beaded and gleaming as they run across bright sand toward a pale seam of surf, and it withholds every expression we might read them by. What we are shown instead is anatomy in motion, the swing of an arm, the flex of a running thigh, water sliding off skin. Faces would have told us too much; the backs keep the picture open.
It is cleanly built. The frame is organized around a single diagonal of receding figures, the nearest boy large and sharp in the lower right, the others diminishing toward the top like notes falling away, so that scale alone measures the distance they have already run. The high sun flattens the sand to near-white and models each spine in hard relief, while a scatter of footprints records where the whole group came from. The drawing is done entirely by light; the empty foreground supplies the pause before the eye is pulled uphill toward the water.
As a physical object the print rewards the restraint: a gelatin silver sheet toned in selenium the year after exposure, its whites held just short of blank and its darks given the density that wet skin against glare demands. Selenium buys both the tonal separation and the archival life. The photographer, who founded the gallery that shows the work, has made an image about departure that keeps its subjects forever mid-stride, running out of the frame and never quite gone.
Not one face is offered here. The photograph gives us five children from behind, their wet backs beaded and gleaming as they run across bright sand toward a pale seam of surf, and it withholds every expression we might read them by. What we are shown instead is anatomy in motion, the swing of an arm, the flex of a running thigh, water sliding off skin. Faces would have told us too much; the backs keep the picture open.
It is cleanly built. The frame is organized around a single diagonal of receding figures, the nearest boy large and sharp in the lower right, the others diminishing toward the top like notes falling away, so that scale alone measures the distance they have already run. The high sun flattens the sand to near-white and models each spine in hard relief, while a scatter of footprints records where the whole group came from. The drawing is done entirely by light; the empty foreground supplies the pause before the eye is pulled uphill toward the water.
As a physical object the print rewards the restraint: a gelatin silver sheet toned in selenium the year after exposure, its whites held just short of blank and its darks given the density that wet skin against glare demands. Selenium buys both the tonal separation and the archival life. The photographer, who founded the gallery that shows the work, has made an image about departure that keeps its subjects forever mid-stride, running out of the frame and never quite gone.