Wide Lux Sand Picture, Cape Cod, Massachusetts c. 1977 - 1979

Harry Callahan made this photograph on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and called it "Wide Lux Sand Picture." He used light to coax the textures and forms of the beach into something else. It's really all about surface, isn't it? How the rake of the sand shifts from smooth flatness to these deep combed ridges, like a Zen garden someone has been at. It's sensual and tactile. I mean, look at the very bottom of the photograph, how the sand becomes almost purple, casting a shadow. You can feel the coolness of that shadowed area, the heat from the rest. The wind is practically blowing in your face. There is a whole history of landscape photography that Callahan is in dialogue with here, from Steichen to Strand. And it's a conversation that's still going on, this attempt to find the sublime in the everyday, the monumental in the mundane. It's about looking and feeling, about paying attention to the world around us.