The fleeting worlds captured at low tide
WESTPORT PHOTOGRAPHER NANCY BREAKSTONE SEES WHAT OTHERS DON’T WHEN THE TIDE GOES OUT
The photographic series Nancy Breakstone calls “Impressions in the Sand: the Art of the Ocean” is unique in two ways.
Its singular source is a lava rock strewn beach on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Plus, no one else can see what Breakstone does. The images she captures are too fleeting, each one erased by the next incoming wave. Infinite in variety, they invite disbelief.
One, titled “Fleeing,” looks like an aerial photograph of migrating Saharan animals. Another, “Willows,” is a scrimshaw carving in blue and bone white. The orange and black “Deep in the Sand” could be a stormy sunset. In “Holding On,” Breakstone catches a glimpse of what might be a fledgling angel, yet to unfold its wings.
“I see things in the sand other people don’t see,” Breakstone says. “I’ve gotten the weirdest looks from people, like what are you doing? I’m standing there in the water, just shooting sand. People say, “Can we go with you?’ Afterwards, I’ve shown them some shots. I say, ‘You see that?’ They say, ‘No? What?’ Even my husband doesn’t see what I see.”
Breakstone, who lives in Westport, discovered the beach called Playa Negra about six years ago when she went there for a vacation. She’s been back 14 times since and has shown photos from her trips in twice that many exhibits over the last couple of years. Currently, she has two in the longrunning “About Women” group show at Norwalk’s LockwoodMathews Mansion Museum, curated by Roger Mudre of the Silvermine Arts Center.
The way she describes her beach and her process it’s easy to picture her as a fisherman poised over a secret fishing hole.To avoid joggers, dogs and horses (which run free), she secludes herself on a section of the beach broken by slabs of black lava.
“It’s only when the tide is going out that I find these patterns,” she says. “The waves are small then, maybe a couple inches in height. The water will start to pull out the pattern and then I can hear the next wave coming. So I have just a couple seconds to shoot, because the next wave will change the pattern slightly.”
Remarkably, Breakstone is able to discern images in those few seconds. Despite appearances, she isn’t “just standing there, shooting sand,” randomly taking pictures.
She watches and waits for images to emerge. Nor does she alter the images much after transferring them to her computer. The colors greens, blues, yellows - and shadows are created by the sun. She times her expeditions to ebb tides in early morning or late afternoon when the sun strikes the wet sand at an angle.
A judge in a PIC Darien show she entered wrote of her work: “Are we seeing these landscapes/ seascapes from space or just inches away? Either way, the images capture worlds within worlds …”
Breakstone says she’s always been attuned to the water. She grew up in Old Greenwich, riding her bike to the beach, fishing with her father. Later, married with children and working as a paralegal, vacations meant sailing. She also became such an avid windsurfer and paddleboarder that she traveled to competitions. She’s always done photography but dedicated herself to it full time after retiring and finding the lava rock beach in Costa Rica .
On her first trip, visiting the beach to surf cast, she says, “I started noticing these patterns start to form. I would stand there and wait. I was just amazed at at how beautiful they were. I became obsessed with them.”
On her return trips, timed to the tides, she would stay as long as two weeks photographing. She sometimes speaks of it as documenting a natural process. “I don’t do anything,” she says. “I always say it’s the ocean that’s the artist and the sand is the canvas. I’m just take part in the art being formed.”
Breakstone came back from her most recent trip in February, and has been forced by COVID-19 to postpone one planned for November. In the meantime, she’s begun showing work from two newer series.
One is of photos taken at the TWA Hotel that took over the JFK airport terminal originally designed by the architect Eero Saarinen. Breakstone says she began staying overnight there to catch early morning flight to Costa Rica and that the photos are details of sculptures and other structures in the restored terminal.
As with her sand photos, it is impossible to guess the source. They are also abstract, but with simpler geometric shapes and bolder colors. In some, like “The Bend,” planetary bodies eclipse one another. Others could be visual renderings of a physicist’s speculative models. One titled, “In Depth,” was in the Silvermine Arts Center “Summer Salon” exhibition that closed Aug. 20.
Cut off from travel, Breakstone has a third series taken close to home. The source is more evident, close-ups flowers or raindrops, but the resulting images are abstract. Several are in the current Rowayton Arts Center “Photography and Sculpture” exhibition that runs to Sept. 6. Breakstone served as cochair of the show, but the entries were chosen by a juror, Thomas Mezzanotte, a photographer with a studio in Bridgeport’s AmFab arts building.
The “About Women” show at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum features work by roughly three dozen Silvermine Guild female artists. The works are displayed salon style, from eye level to ceiling, in the mansion’s former billiard room.
Breakstone’s two sand photos, hung separately from one another, appear so textured they could be mistaken for paintings. The texture comes from the sand and the color from the sun reflected in the water.
The exhibit marks the reopening of the museum and can be viewed on tours that for now are scheduled Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. The exhibit runs to Jan. 3.