The obvious answer is that water is beautiful, endlessly various, and hard to photograph. Beneath that is something sharper: water is the subject where looking-to-keep fails and looking-to-be-present begins. It has no edges, never holds still, and is never the same twice – so it defeats every habit a representational photographer is trained in. That defeat is exactly my doorway to abstraction. Looking at water taught me to stop thinking in terms of capture, and to begin thinking in terms of attention.
Try to look at a body of water and notice where your eye lands. It doesn't, quite. It slides around. There is the surface, and the light sitting on the surface, and the thing beneath the surface, and a reflection of the sky lying across all of it - and the eye cannot hold onto them all at once, so it fixates on one element then drifts elsewhere. You think you are looking at one thing but that is really not the case.
I have spent a great deal of my life looking at water. Mostly as a photographer who wanted to keep it, retain it, capture it somehow. But also as someone who eventually gave up trying to hold onto it and started, instead, to watch.
The ocean is the subject that defeats the camera most decisively. A mountain will hold still for you. A building will generally stick around long enough for the photographer to do their thing. Water has never waited, and the photograph of it is always a small lie of stillness - a single frame stopped out of something that was not for one moment still. Early on, this frustrated me. I wanted the sea I had seen, and the sea I had seen was already gone by the time the shutter closed. I have a great many photographs of water that are technically water and yet they contain none of it.
It has taken me a long time to understand that this was not a failure of equipment or skill. It is the nature of the thing. Water has no edges. Everything I had been taught about making a picture - the frame, the subject, the decisive moment - assumes a world that holds its shape long enough to be composed. Water refuses to conform in this way. You cannot compose water. You can only be there when it does something, and be ready, and accept that what you keep will be a fragment of a fragment.
And then there is the overlap. Stand at the edge of still water on a bright day
and there are many elements in the same place: the surface, the sky laid across it, the depth, with whatever is below. A reflection and a stone occupy the same plane in your eye. You have to decide which to resolve. Painters have always known the eye negotiates the world rather than simply receiving it, but water makes that negotiation tricky.
Observing the ocean is all about playing the long game. Less like hunting, more like waiting. The hunter's attention is narrow and forward-leaning: find the shot, take it, move on. The other kind is wider and requires patience. You are not looking for anything in particular. You are letting the water happen in front of you. Wind writes on it, whips it up and rubs it out. The light shifts and the whole surface changes, from pewter to something almost white, and then the cloud moves and it is pewter again. There is no way that you are going to catch this. And that is not, any longer, the point.
There is so much to see and it is endlessly fascinating. The way a swell lifts without breaking, like a muscle moving under skin. The lacy filigree shapes a wave leaves as it retreats. The line, on a moving sea, where reflection gives way to transparency and you can suddenly see down into deep, bottomless green. Foam holding its pattern a second longer than seems possible before the next water erases it. None of it repeats. You could watch for the rest of your life and not see the same second twice.
The thing I was reaching for with abstraction, a field of colour and light with no fixed subject, all surface and movement and dissolve - had been there in water all along. It is the original abstraction. It is not of anything. Looking at it is watching what I am trying to make. It makes itself, with no help from me.
The water does not need to be looked at. It was doing all of this before I arrived and will do it after, indifferent to whether any eye is on it. I continue to look anyway. Not to hold onto it - I have largely - although not entirely - given up on that. In the same way that I recall my 5 year old self trying endlessly to reinvent a new colour, I continue to feel there must be a yet-to-be-discovered combination of settings on my camera, a slick technique in the studio that will allow me to capture and retain what it truly is.
In the meantime I make do with being in the presence of something entirely itself that asks nothing of me. The surface always moving, the depth holding what it holds. The image, if one comes, comes afterwards, almost as an afterthought - the residue of having paid attention.
The water moves. I watch it move. That is the whole of it, nothing more happens, and nothing more is needed.