A horizon. The last day of a month. The contours of a moon as it waxes and wanes, or is bisected into planes by cloud ribbons. A season as it elides into its successor. A dock’s sharp edges rendered in wavering saltwater. The end of the visible world. On edge. Over the edge: on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Edges of stone and glass and steel. Of solid and liquid, land and air. A rainbow’s or razor’s edge. The edge of extinction and at a day’s beginning and end. Crossing over the edge from photograph into art.
Of all the edges I’ve photographed, it’s the last and most metaphorical that immediately came to mind: not a visible border, but a feeling–of decided, edgy discomfort–captured in a single image of infinite shifting edges of basalt near the unsettled black sands of Reynifjara, Iceland. Sharply-shifting planes. Off-kilter bones of bilious algae-green.
Another feeling entirely was captured in photos near the end of my husband’s life, at the end of our world, when he held onto a cliff’s edge and snapped pictures of rare Pacific nesting birds:
“We rowed to the island where . . . offspring were likely to have recently hatched. . . . [He] carefully clambered to the cliff’s edge while the rest of us stood at the short distance the island’s circumference permitted. He beamed at us, his backpack weighting him as he stood with his back to the sheer drop-off to blue-green water and ragged volcanic rock. I held my breath as he slipped almost entirely out of view while leaning away from the cliff’s edge at a respectful distance from the nest, which was built into the cliff’s face and none of the rest of us could see. Jim may well have been the only human ever to have had that vantage point and beheld those new lives.
I watched the sun glint off something out of sight, probably his wedding band, as he clicked his camera’s shutter with his free hand. I shouted into the wind for my terminally ill husband, who would not survive that season, to be careful.
I am sure he grinned if my voice carried his way.”
Love in the Spaces 