At the Water’s Edge — David Lurie
For centuries, the sea has been romanticized as a metaphor for peace, calm, and timeless beauty. Its vast expanse has offered solace, a vision of stability against the turbulence of daily life. Standing on the shore, generations of poets, painters, and photographers have seen in the ocean a promise of renewal, a reminder of nature’s essential life force. These metaphors, rooted in ideas of transcendence and escape, have deeply shaped our cultural imagination of the sea.

Few contemporary photography-artists embody this tradition more powerfully than Hiroshi Sugimoto. His seascapes, made in strict formal repetition, depict sea and sky divided by a horizon line. They evoke timelessness, serenity, and meditative stillness: an eternal present, an unchanging surface that erases historical contingency and momentary disturbance, the ultimate site of calm. In his own words: “Every time I see the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.”

But since, and even before, the pandemic, my own relationship to the sea has shifted profoundly. The metaphors that once spoke of peace now seem at odds with the times. More often than not, when I stand at the water’s edge today, I do not see tranquility or comfort. I see distance, isolation, and disconnect. The sea’s vastness, once a refuge, now mirrors the dislocations of our fractured world: borders that divide, communities that retreat into themselves, governments unable to cooperate in the face of numerous crises. The horizon, instead of offering infinite possibility, carries a sense of abandonment, of being cut adrift in a world that feels increasingly unstable and unmoored.

The sea has become, for me, a metaphor for our contemporary state of being: fear, aloneness, despair, but also the stubborn persistence of looking outward when hope is uncertain. It is no longer a passive background but an existential presence: Its scale and silence are stark reminders of our fragility, impermanence, and our precarious collective future.

On a more personal note, this work arises from the simple act of looking closely at and mining my immediate surroundings for meaning. Living in Hout Bay, Cape Town, the ocean is always near— restless, enveloping, unavoidable. These photographs are not distant meditations but rather my daily encounters with the shoreline and the shifting weather. In photographing the sea, I seek images that convey the world as I experience it: unsettled, fractured, yet ever capable of reflection and meaning.

The series At the Water’s Edge does not offer the sea as a balm. Instead, it asks how this ancient metaphor might speak to us differently in the present, not merely as a dream of calm, but also as a mirror of our disquiet. Its horizons, seemingly, reflect not timeless serenity, but the urgent questions of our time. To stand at the water’s edge today is to look at the sea and to glimpse, in all its vastness, both our deepest anxieties and our enduring need to make sense of them.

September, 2025