November (Murre Rock–2019)

Many of my projects are made with a set of rules in mind, a certain heuristic, sort of an aesthetic clockwork that runs and produces the work, guided and adjusted by me all along but still forming the hidden backbone of the project.

For November, made shortly before the Pandemic in November of 2019, I decided to photograph what I call Murre Rock (its real name is, I think, Egg Rock), off the coast of California near my home. It is situated off the cliffs of Devil’s Slide where we used to drive at high speeds—a three-hundred-foot cliff down on one side, a three-hundred-foot cliff up on the other—until a large landslide blocked the road in 2006, an expensive tunnel soon built and the old road turned into a state park.

I say “photograph” though I mean “shoot video of”—I use the two terms interchangeably—and to just shoot the rock for ten minutes or so each day of the month of November.

Below are one-minute clips of each of the videos—it’s so much better to see the full 4k clips on a large screen but this sample will give you the idea.

I didn’t know what to expect but I surely did not expect to be wearing an N95 mask by day four—not to protect against the SARS-CoV-2 virus (which we had no inkling of) but to attempt to filter out some of the smoke from the Kincade Fire, burning not far to the north above San Francisco. That mist you see in the video isn’t our famous fog, it’s smoke, the Sun sometimes purple as it approaches the horizon.