Home»all photographs»landscapes»rocks

Almost all these photos are from a single beach: Dume Cove, in Malibu. Dume is time's open laboratory, where present time works at changing the residue of past times.
Point Dume, its western limit, is a plug of harder volcanic rock that withstood the waves' battering for longest. Here the rocks (coming later) are multicolored: blues, reds, purples, browns, yellows.
Immediately to the East the rocks are metamorphic - layered sediments of sandstone wonderfully transformed by the proximity of heat into sheets of white and grey that resemble marble reliefs, inscriptions in ancient languages, or finely tiled pavements.
Further away from the volcanic heat, the sandstones record the ancient beaches they once were: the pressurized sand, the ripples, sometimes raindrops.
The beach is in a state of constant transformation by daily tides and visiting storms. A powerful storm can change the beach completely overnight, sometimes revealing the beautiful rocks in pristine cleanness and clarity, more often burying them in thick layers of sand.
On a slower level, breakers erode the cliffs base and break boulders away; waves wash in pebbles that scrape and polish; algae embed their holdfasts, shipworms grind holes through solid stone.
Everything here is in a state of constant flux. As it is everywhere, but mostly we do not perceive it so clearly.