Slate blue, violet-grey, and one diagonal seam of curdled cream: the palette here is entirely weather’s. But a texture rides on top of it: pale circles swelling across the lower half of the frame and through the tree’s dark crown. That is rain on glass, recorded as faithfully as the cloud. The photograph wears the evidence of its own making, a window’s worth of weather kept like fingerprints.
Down on the ridge, almost incidental, stand two figures, close together but not touching, dwarfed by the tree beside them and the rift of light above. Any family album contains this picture’s ancestor: a couple posed on a hill, asked to hold still. Here no one asked. They were simply there, between the photographer’s window and the breaking sky, and the shutter took them in along with the rain. The result behaves less like a view than like the memory of one, complete with the blur where feeling has worn recall thin.
As an object the archival pigment print keeps both registers intact: the deep continuous tones of the storm and the crisp punctuation of the drops, ink settled into paper the way weather settles into a day. Its maker, born in Kent, Ohio in 1968 and long resident in the San Francisco Bay Area, files his images under numbers, this one 10783-11, as though they were negatives in a drawer awaiting rediscovery. Institutions have done the rediscovering: SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney all hold his prints. What circulates with this one is a doubled weather, the storm seen and the storm touched.
Slate blue, violet-grey, and one diagonal seam of curdled cream: the palette here is entirely weather’s. But a texture rides on top of it: pale circles swelling across the lower half of the frame and through the tree’s dark crown. That is rain on glass, recorded as faithfully as the cloud. The photograph wears the evidence of its own making, a window’s worth of weather kept like fingerprints.
Down on the ridge, almost incidental, stand two figures, close together but not touching, dwarfed by the tree beside them and the rift of light above. Any family album contains this picture’s ancestor: a couple posed on a hill, asked to hold still. Here no one asked. They were simply there, between the photographer’s window and the breaking sky, and the shutter took them in along with the rain. The result behaves less like a view than like the memory of one, complete with the blur where feeling has worn recall thin.
As an object the archival pigment print keeps both registers intact: the deep continuous tones of the storm and the crisp punctuation of the drops, ink settled into paper the way weather settles into a day. Its maker, born in Kent, Ohio in 1968 and long resident in the San Francisco Bay Area, files his images under numbers, this one 10783-11, as though they were negatives in a drawer awaiting rediscovery. Institutions have done the rediscovering: SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney all hold his prints. What circulates with this one is a doubled weather, the storm seen and the storm touched.