another case of the Ephemeral

I continue to explore the mysteries of connotation that accompany the images in my Flickr photostream, wondering what inspires or provokes their composition and capture. Often it’s only during the processing phase that I recognize what a photograph contains, or means, or alludes to. This one is an example of an unsolved problem:


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This is simply a salt deposit left on a rock by the receding tide, a phenomenon that seems to happen when the air temperature is well below freezing. The next tide will obliterate the pattern, so its life is only a few hours. The complexity seems to demand an interpretation, an effort to parse the pattern for some sort of figurative meaning. Thusfar I haven’t discerned any faces or other recognizable forms beyond the sinusoidal curve that’s uppermost. There’s something evocative of Japanese painting in the deposit below the thicker curve, but overall I have no better option than to label the image as ‘abstract’. So what drew me to it? Why did I capture it? There’s something elegant in the curves and textures, but beyond that I can’t reconstruct my specific motivation or thought process. It just seemed to ask to be harvested and saved from oblivion.

Does it help at all to mirror the image?


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Ah. Now I see something analogous to the figure seen on so many New England gravestones, the symmetrical wings around the death’s head:

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But this symmetrical extension doesn’t solve any of the original problems of interpretation, or get me any further along in the quest to comprehend the genesis of the image. The original photograph is a satisfying composition, slightly ambiguous in scale, a small detail in the grand complexity of a particular landscape in space and time, and perhaps makes sense only in the context of a gatheration of photographs of salt deposits on rocks.

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