When these two women walked past me at the beach I made the assumption that they were a mother-daughter combination and I thought they might be a picture worth taking. I didn’t photograph them right away. I was there to photograph the surfers but the acrobatics going on across the waves were not enough to keep me from watching the two of them as they walked away from me. The older woman struck a classic image of a cape cod beachcomber with her flowing, untucked, white shirt and her cotton pants rolled up to reveal bare feet. This wasn’t her first walk on the beach.
Something out in the water caught their attention and they stopped to look at it. The figure of the woman, arm raised and finger pointing, with a warm glow of late afternoon sun lighting her face and reflecting off her silver hair, reminded me of something I’d recently read.
Vincent Van Gogh talked about walking on a beach in a letter to his brother, Theo, in 1882.
“How good it is to walk along an empty beach and look at the gray-green sea with its long, white streaks of waves, when you are feeling depressed.”
Van Gogh found something at the beach that lifted his spirits and he wanted to share it with his brother. People everywhere, and for all time, have found the same solace at the ocean.
The moment the woman raised her arm and made me remember Van Gogh’s letter I saw her image as a metaphor and it became the picture I wanted to take. We walk on the beach because we are looking for something.
Monte