Water and Stone

It is one of those photographs that keeps urging your tongue to speak—and yet it cannot. This is the miracle of the image: it pushes aside before and after, yet stubbornly insists to see them—the seasons when the scent of autumn and spring filled the air, when the drops of water could be heard, when color flowed, and the cold had not yet settled into the picture.

What happened that he took the photograph and withheld from us the melting of ice, the warmth of the scene? How did this soft, flowing white water freeze forever within the picture—turning cold and heavy, pushing the rock aside and taking center stage? Now the photograph longs to speak of the splashing of water that is no longer there, or of the silence that has overtaken everything. Of water’s softness turned hard and coarse; of the chill of the image and the tight embrace of water and stone—an embrace of black and white—and of water becoming stone.