it's because of the corner

“It’s because of the corner,” she said, in response to my asking how the line of shingle was formed. This made no sense but I’d learned not to argue with a geography teacher. But just how could a ‘corner’ create a straight line? And in any case, I could see no corner…

It turns out that the shingle bar is locally called ‘The Street’. At certain tides it is merely an unexplained line of wave turbulence stretching out into the muddy Thames Estuary at Whitstable, Kent. At other tidal times it is an inexplicable straight line of flint shingle six hundred metres long, calm water one side, turbulent the other. There is a very strange childlike feeling of being somewhere else, dislocated from the land, floating out into the sea on a bed of heavy flint - so it's always best to keep an eye on rising water as the landward end of the bar may flood...

‘Corner’ became a book of photographs from the previous 6 years of wandering across time-zones, with images from Argentina, England, India, Isle of Man, Japan, Jersey, Norway, and USA. A bi-lingual English/Japanese title (one the characters appears very much like the flooding shingle bar). A single-copy edition, so rather rare. One owner. It may even have gone the way of Dunwich by now. A version could appear in this blog, but probably not...

Afterwards, I became more visually sensitive to corners, some very subtle or inferred, some as obvious as this one in Helsinki that, three months later, lured me from my cosy hotel lounge out into some very crisp sunlight. The weather clouded and warmed up to melt this image away within hours. As a memory.

I like the angular correspondence and dissonance between these two images. And they are both ephemeral in their own ways. Just different time cycles - tidal and seasonal.