Holding My Breath

I took over 20 photos the night I went to view the sand sculptures created on Hampton Beach on the New Hampshire Seacoast by master  sculptors from all over the United states and Canada. This was one of the few that didn’t come out blurry. It also happens to be the first place winner. I didn’t understand why every picture was accompanied by the warning: “This image is blurry. Do you want to delete it?” Dejectedly, I would choose “yes” for most of them, although I kept a few. Finally my friend Ellen told me, “you have to hold your breath.” Sure enough, that held the camera still long enough to get this shot. I imagine creating these sculptures is something like that: an image comes to mind, and as the sculptor begins to shape and smooth the sand, they hold their breath so as not to disturb the fine contours of their creation. So to is writing: an image comes to mind, and you focus your concentration on just the word coming out on the screen as you type. Nothing else matters until you get to the end of what’s in your mind. Then you breathe again.

This image isn’t quite as clear as I’d hoped, but I think it kind of works. The sculpture is a woman growing out of the confines of a modern city-like skyscraper; the blurriness of my photography adds movement. Without it, she might just be a static sand-doll trapped and not breaking free.

If the man holding the earth and the woman emerging out of the sky scraper got together, do you think this is what their child might be like? A little sand-baby peeping out of a sharply sculpted sand-egg. Or perhaps it’s a womb. My friend Ellen thought it was a womb, and maybe she was right.

This one is really, really, blurry. But like a rough draft that has some promise if you polish it just right, I decided to keep it any way.