Afternoon Without Agenda

Some sessions have a mood board; this one had a bus ticket. We walked until the houses ran out and the beach started, and photographed whatever the wind and the flat light offered.

He is a writer, and the pictures were for the back of a book. The publisher wanted a face; he wanted the sea. We compromised on a person walking away from the camera, which the publisher printed and the writer framed.

Flat light

Overcast afternoons are the kindest light for a figure in a landscape. Nothing to fight, nothing to fix, only the person and the tide line. The sand does the rest: it is a page, and a person on it is a sentence.

A portrait does not need a face. It needs a person who has stopped thinking about the camera.

The walk back

We walked four kilometres and talked about anything but the book. The frames from the walk back are the ones in the edit: the light had dropped, the wind had turned, and he had forgotten I was there, which is the only thing I ask of anyone I photograph.

The bus was late. We photographed the bus stop too, and the village behind it, and the island you can see from the end of the road on a clear day. It was not a clear day; the island is in the pictures anyway, as a rumour.