A Sub-Series of Ecotone
Only You Are Close, When Everything Is Far Away
Bodies at the edge of water, during the year the world could not be touched.
This series emerged during the pandemic, when distance became the condition of every body in the world. Skin, the body's first and most vulnerable threshold, could no longer be reached. Travel collapsed. Studios closed. The way this practice had worked for years, in groups, in shared rooms, with the intimacy of near proximity, stopped at once.
Only You Are Close, When Everything Is Far Away was made in that suspended time. It is the pandemic chapter of Ecotone, the long-form series on the body and the natural environment. What changes here is the emotional register. Ecotone places the body among horses, trees, blossoms, and water, as one element of an ecosystem. This sub-series places the body alone, sitting, crouched, curled, or turned away, on a narrow strip of dark sand where land meets water and nothing else enters the frame.
The landscape is minimal to the point of abstraction: wet shore, small waves, a thin horizon. No trees, no architecture, no visible weather, no other people. The body has the whole frame to itself but is small within it, pushed toward the corner, sometimes barely legible against the darker sand. What the images record is less the body in nature than the body's distance from nature. The wave is close; the water is close; the earth is close. Everything else is far away.
The title comes from the emotional structure of that period. The people who were still physically close became almost unbearably close, while everything outside the domestic perimeter withdrew into screens. The closeness in the title is a fact about proximity under constraint more than a comfort: when the world recedes, whatever remains within arm's reach becomes the whole of experience.
The figures are photographed from the back, from a distance, at moments of stillness rather than gesture. The refusal of the face is deliberate. These are studies of the condition of being alone with a body beside water, at a time when this was one of the few forms of encounter still available, more than portraits of a specific person. The black-and-white tonal range holds the images in a register more austere than the colour work elsewhere in Ecotone.
The sub-series was made across a single extended period and remains a distinct, coherent cycle within Ecotone. It has not been reopened since.
Works from the Series
Black-and-white photographs made in-camera, on location.
