Long before anyone thought to stand here, the sea was laying down this rock in patient horizontal bands, one thin layer at a time, and now a pair of sand-dusted feet has parked itself on top of the whole slow archive. The toes grip the ridged stone; grains of pale sand cling to the dark skin like sugar. It is the sort of collision between two clocks that only a beach arranges.
There is comedy in the mismatch of durations. The rock has been at it for an age nobody can picture; the feet will be gone from the frame in a minute or two, off to do whatever feet do at the shore. Between them, in the little gully, a scatter of shells and pebbles waits like loose change dropped by the tide. The photograph, being neither geology nor a snapshot exactly, holds both timescales in one square, and lets you feel the absurd distance between them without saying a word about it.
You could call the title a joke that means it. Time is the subject and also the medium; the strata are its long form, the feet its short. The print is gelatin silver toned with selenium, made the year after the exposure, which lends the shadows a bluish density and keeps the sugary grains crisp against skin. Saula, who took the picture and founded the gallery that shows it, tends to work this close and this elemental, trusting a hand-printed square of grey to carry more time than its size suggests.
Long before anyone thought to stand here, the sea was laying down this rock in patient horizontal bands, one thin layer at a time, and now a pair of sand-dusted feet has parked itself on top of the whole slow archive. The toes grip the ridged stone; grains of pale sand cling to the dark skin like sugar. It is the sort of collision between two clocks that only a beach arranges.
There is comedy in the mismatch of durations. The rock has been at it for an age nobody can picture; the feet will be gone from the frame in a minute or two, off to do whatever feet do at the shore. Between them, in the little gully, a scatter of shells and pebbles waits like loose change dropped by the tide. The photograph, being neither geology nor a snapshot exactly, holds both timescales in one square, and lets you feel the absurd distance between them without saying a word about it.
You could call the title a joke that means it. Time is the subject and also the medium; the strata are its long form, the feet its short. The print is gelatin silver toned with selenium, made the year after the exposure, which lends the shadows a bluish density and keeps the sugary grains crisp against skin. Saula, who took the picture and founded the gallery that shows it, tends to work this close and this elemental, trusting a hand-printed square of grey to carry more time than its size suggests.