Yesterday, Gallery at Marina Square in Morro Bay opened their Ocean’s Edge photography show, which will run throughout the month of April, and I have four photos in the show.
One of those photos, Tidepool Tiger, is shown at the top of the article. It’s a little bagatelle of a scene from one of the coastal tidepools hereabout, with sharply accentuated color and a little bit of posterization. It’s the smallest of my pieces in the show.
The Central Coast is, as you might imagine, quite rich with tidepools, and some photographers manage to find all sorts of amazing things (octopi, starfish, aliens, Luca Brasi) in them. Me, not so much, but I was happy to come across this pugnacious little dude one afternoon on an outing with Carol.
A bit larger work, and arguably my major opus in the exhibition, is this one, called Things Fall Apart.
One of my favorite photo subjects around here is surfers and surfing, and I caught this picture more or less accidentally one day from Cayucos pier. At first it didn’t make much of an impression, but the more I looked at it, the more it got the hooks in me. That mysterious silhouette in the foreground (which has not been exaggerated or accentuated from the original) really sealed the deal.
After I amped up the green and blue channels a bit, and cropped to a square, a sneaky-good composition came to life: my favorite scaffold — an “X” — with the dominant diagonal from lower right to upper left, and the supporting diagonal anchored by that little pop of orange surfboard in the foreground. The two figures on the right line up from front to back to provide depth, with the tilt of the surfboard echoing the head tilt of the front figure.
The title is, of course, a nod to Yeats’ famous poem The Second Coming:
…
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
…
I’m not the first to find Yeats’ poem sublimely applicable to the world of 2026. Make of that what you will.
Ronald Crittenden 