The Surf Does Not Negotiate
Where the Water Refuses, Then Conspires
It has been a couple of weeks since my last post. Before returning to the ideas I have been tracking here, I want to share a more personal field note from a recent week in Culebra and Culebrita, Puerto Rico, where the work clarified something new about how I want to make and present these images. Think of it as a chapter, one that is nudging me toward a more serial, place-bound way of articulating my work.
I once wrote about a guide who sometimes came to me in dreams and is now often with me in waking life. She knows the living world, loves it, and moves through nature with intention, agency, and awe. She nurtures without trying to own. She listens more than she takes. She teaches by paying attention. She climbs, swims, and plays, as I do, but mostly she just lets nature be.
Inspired by her, I began looking again, not for spectacle, but for intricacy, individuality, interrelatedness; the quiet intelligence of living things, how they move, grow, fail, and return. In my dreams, I want that too. In my waking hours, I practice being a responsible part of that larger ecosystem.
She has a long history with Puerto Rico. Culebra, lodged between the Greater Antilles and the Leeward Islands, is one of her favorite places to return to, not because it sells itself loudly, but because it can still feel remote. It sits a little off the main current, often overshadowed by its larger neighbor, Vieques. You can feel that these islands have been shaped by forces bigger than beach days; by policy and access, by the long reach of plans. Even if you do not recite the history, you can sense it in what is protected, what is restricted, what feels open, and what still feels watched.
We arrived with that mix of ease and awareness that a vacation can hold when you let it. Yet the week carried its own background noise. In the news, geopolitics and intervention were a constant thread, and it stayed with us. Puerto Rico is not a sealed bubble. You stand at the ferry in Ceiba, or look out to sea from Playa Tortuga, or from the hills above Piscinas Naturales on Culebrita, a gem of an island off an island off an island, and you remember you are at an edge, not just of land, but of logistics, strategy, and proximity. Paradise has a perimeter.
Still, what I remember most is simpler. The light. The warmth. The feeling of having fewer obligations than usual, and the rare permission to let the days be shaped by water and appetite. Not needing to do much beyond swim, snorkel, eat, sleep, have sex, and decide which beach to go to next, the week became an ideal setting to work without forcing it. An idle mind is not always lazy. Sometimes it is the most receptive state. Sometimes it is where experiments actually happen.
Two years ago, I came to Culebra and returned with a handful of images I loved. This time, I made many more, and somewhere in the middle, I began to recognize something new. The pictures did not feel like additions to an ongoing archive. They felt like a chapter, a poem in their own right.
I have made beach images before, on Long Island and Lake Superior shores, in Rincón, Puerto Rico, plenty of them, and I love their familiar geometry. But Culebra’s water is a different presence. The turquoise is not just color; it is a condition. The sand is not just sand; it is a texture that changes your gait. The horizon seems to arrive faster. The air bathes you. And my guide was nearby, feeling a sense of ease, which changed the whole tempo. When you are with someone who is practiced at paying attention, you borrow their patience. You stop trying only to collect evidence. You start receiving.
The surf, though, is not patient. It is one of the most volatile environments for my process, and I went straight for it, despite an earlier promise that I would just be. It was too seductive. Waves quickly rushed in and out. Rhythmically, repeating, then breaking their own repetition. My smartphone engine wanted continuity, a cohesive progression, a scene that could be assembled into one long sentence. The water refuses. Too much motion, too quickly. It gives you beauty, then takes it back before you can hold it. If my technique thrives on movement, the surf is movement that does not negotiate.
That is what made it so satisfying. At the threshold of beach and sea, with hot sun at my back and its heat in the sand, I could feel the limits of my tool and the limits of my own control. Feet in water, then feet in sand, walking the seam where the world keeps changing. Drawing, erasing. I followed the shifting cast of shadows as if they were threads. Sometimes the stitches held. Sometimes they buckled. Sometimes they produced something I could never have planned.
There is a specific pleasure in working in a place where you are not trying to prove anything. The stakes are lower, which makes you braver. You let more happen. You tolerate the messiness. You do not rush to decide what counts. You can make a day of it, and then make another day, and then another, and slowly the work starts to describe the week rather than merely decorate it.
That is the change I want to honor. I have spent a lot of time building bodies of work under larger umbrellas, like Stepmaster or Stairmaster, and I still believe in those structures. But Culebra wants to stay attached to itself. Not as a travelogue, not as a postcard, but as a record of a particular stretch of lived time. A sequence made under specific conditions, with a certain wind, a certain water, a certain private life, a certain person beside me.
In other words, it pushes me toward a more traditional photographic approach, not in method, but in presentation. The old idea that a place and a time can be a coherent unit, that a trip can be a chapter. I used to think of that structure as something I had moved past. Now I see it differently. It is not a retreat. It is a useful and liberating container when I choose to use it.
If Prolongance has taught me anything, it is that attention is not a stance, it is a practice. In Culebra, with my guide nearby, I practiced it differently. I did not try to master the water. I continued to let the water break the sentence when it needed to. I let the week be a week. And in doing so, I think I found a new way to make, and a new way to share.