An Essay on Composition

This photograph began with geometry, but it ended up being about contradiction. Sand, marble, sea—each a distinct texture, each performing under different rules. It’s not a landscape and it’s not abstract, but it borrows from both. The diagonal lines, the flattened depth, the conflict between order and erosion—all deliberate, but not staged.

I rotated the frame on purpose. The eye expects a horizon, some gravitational anchor, but here that’s denied. The marble slabs—cold, precise, quarried and arranged—seem to float or fall, depending on how you orient yourself. The band of sand running diagonally across the frame interrupts their perfection with a tactile, natural disorder: dunes formed by wind, not by hand, textured like fabric but impermanent.

The footprint in the sand wasn’t placed, it was found—just deep enough to catch light, shallow enough not to distract. It reminds the viewer that someone passed through, briefly disrupting the purity of lines with the inevitability of life.

Technically, the image leans into subtlety. The exposure is metered to hold detail in both the soft reflections on the water and the grain of the sand. The colour palette is intentionally restrained: cold greens, silvery blues, warm earth tones. No correction was needed. I let the marble veining stay slightly underexposed in places; it made the surface feel heavier. The water, textured but still, becomes a painterly plane more than a fluid surface.

I was less interested in making a beautiful image than in building a visual sentence—a quiet essay on contrast, balance, decay, and repetition. If it feels a little unresolved, that’s fine. The best essays don’t close with conclusions.