Introduction

Some of this land exists. You could stand on it. Some of it never did — it assembled itself out of fog and salt and the wish for a place, and it is no less true for that.

What the pictures share is not a country. It is a way of looking: at the single tree still standing after the field has gone; at the root hauled into the light, holding nothing now but air; at the water keeping its perfect, indifferent copy of whatever leans over it.

The land here is a body. It carries what has happened to it. A trunk bends the way a person bends under a long wind, and does not straighten. A stump opens its roots like a hand opened too late. Stone outlasts the village, the boat outlasts the water, the cut mark outlasts the hand that made it. Nothing is spared, and nothing is quite lost, because the ground remembers in the only language it has, which is shape.

Look long enough and the figures come. A form in the rock that was only rock. Two trees on a ridge that are, almost, two people. And once — only once — two people, who are no one but themselves, sitting where the light goes.

That is the third thing these pictures expose, after the paper and the eye: that we go into the land looking for what we cannot keep, and the land, which keeps everything and no one, lets us.