Archean Motifs Collection
The metaphysical arc reaches its logical conclusion with the fifth and final part, Archean Motifs, which focuses on a small, exposed granite section of the Blue Hill Bay shoreline near Brooklin, Maine. I was there in the summers of 1975 and 1976 as a guest at the summer house of Rufus and Murray Mathewson, friends from Columbia University. I see the photographs from those summer visits as spiritual moments—moments that were perhaps not recognized as such at the time but only later, when contemplating the images. I had little knowledge of geological eons, and the granite forms photographed in this section do not date from the Archean. Nonetheless, I like the association in a metaphorical sense–granite merging with the sea as geology merges with the creation myth.
I found the granite free forms (creations of the camera frame) at the water’s edge to be visually arresting, even shocking, and they suggest a return to the stone images of the preceding parts with their stone masks and odd replicas of the human visage–animated, expressive forms in inanimate stone (or concrete). “Archean Motifs” is, so to speak, the end of the road. Is it also a search for Arcadia, forever denied, the unanswered question. The photographs in the fifth section circle back in a formal way to a fundamental part of the Roxbury portfolio–materials under stress, stressed environments. But the weathering of granite, unlike poster paper and abandoned buildings, occurs over a vast time
