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I create intimate, intertidal landscapes within the threshold between sea and land. This is The Edge of The Sea that Rachel Carson described as "strange and beautiful" and "elusive and indefinable," making its capture and evocation all the more gratifying.

One might call it the liminal in the littoral. On the Pacific coast, twice each day it is land, and twice each day it is sea. It belongs to both; it belongs to neither. In it I find organic structure, shape, shadow, texture, color, and motion, constantly recreated, recombined, and recomposed.

Beyond the subconscious imprint of Turner, Monet, Homer, and Wyeth, I owe an intellectual debt to California Impressionism and to the West Coast Photographic Movement, especially Ansel Adams, Morley Baer, Edward and Brett Weston, Wynn Bullock, and more minimalistic successors such as Roman Loranc.

At first I looked to the tide pools, much as Steinbeck and Ricketts suggested. But as age slowed me, I turned more toward the rocks as Edward Weston had on Point Lobos, where he sought in 1930 "to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be MORE than a rock."

And that's how we come to the rocks on Garrapata Beach. My Garrapata Rock photograph in the Monterey Museum of Art Biennial is an example. It was taken during a foggy negative low tide on October 4,  2024. The rock, uncovered by the extreme low tide, is as solidly etched as the land. The sand is undecided in consistency.  And I have accentuated the continual motion of the water by selecting a long exposure. Thus, the eternal Heraclitean dynamic of the intertidal landscape is revealed in one minimalist photograph.

Rupert Chambers (b. 1944), Monterey County, Garrapata Rock I, 2024, 23.5 x 18.5 in., archival pigment print.