> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Time and motion: catching waves - URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/article-1915jsp/ - Published: 2004-05-26T23:05:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-04-17T11:12:38.000Z - Author: Dominic Pote - Tags: #en, #Migrated, #Import 2026-04-09 19:08, #ImagesUploaded The sea is both subject and object. Herman Melville called it the “greatest metaphor of them all”. Stand at the edge to take its picture, and, as [Dominic Pote](http://www.dominic-pote-photography.co.uk/?ref=opendemocracy.net) shows in a new series of work, you’re more in than out of it. As a vision, it can be consuming, and the shoreline is the wild frontier. So how to catch on camera a thing that’s constantly changing? The digital capacity for ever-faster exposure times can make us feel we’re closer to capturing what Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment”. But have we not also come to understand that time is rhythmic, unfolding, a continuum; how can we divide it into a series of discrete frames? Hokusai’s [Great Wave](http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/hokusai/grt%5Fwave.jpg.html?ref=opendemocracy.net) illuminated what we now know to be the “fractal point” – the point at which things fall apart. And anyone who’s ever tried to catch a wave knows how easy it is to fall from the grace of that particular moment. Was the poet [Louis MacNeice](http://www.ulsterhistory.co.uk/louismcneice.htm?ref=opendemocracy.net) a secret surfer? “Time’s face is not stone nor still his wings … we, being ghosts, cannot catch hold of things.” To discover what the eye of the storm really felt like, [JMW Turner](http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/turner/paintings/stormysea.html?ref=opendemocracy.net) had himself lashed to the mast of a tall-ship and headed out into deep water. On terra firma, [Richard Long](http://www.richardlong.org/sculptures/16.html?ref=opendemocracy.net) takes a line for a walk, and then traces his steps in stone or on paper, mapping himself onto the landscape. So where is the picture? In nature? In the imagination? Maybe, Dominic Pote’s work seems to suggest, it lies both outside and inside, there and here, on land and at sea, endlessly between us. *To follow, six photographs from Dominic Pote’s Shorelines exhibition at the* [*Hellenic Centre*](http://www.helleniccentre.org/?ref=opendemocracy.net)*, and four from previous work.* --- ***Shorelines: six photographs*** ![medium 1](https://www.opendemocracy.net/content/files/2026/04/1_cropped_medium_oceansurf_MO0lJsO-1776424224380.jpg) medium 1 Oceansurf 1 (cropped). *Please enlarge to see full image* “It’s the lived experience I want to convey. And sometimes we experience things as a blur, sometimes we edit out the blurs. Which one is most accurate?” ![medium 2](https://www.opendemocracy.net/content/files/2026/04/2_cropped_medium_LMaIiok-1776424224416.jpg) medium 2 Oceansurf 2 (cropped). *Please enlarge to see full image* “These [pictures](http://www.helleniccentre.org/?ref=opendemocracy.net) were taken on the volcanic shoreline of a Greek island, Milos. The island was formed two or three million years ago.” ![medium 3](https://www.opendemocracy.net/content/files/2026/04/3_cropped_medium_sQWYeaV-1776424224441.jpg) medium 3 Oceansurf 3 (cropped). *Please enlarge to see full image* “The volcano is no longer active, but the shoreline is a place of constant change – a landscape in flux.I’ve been working at this particular shoreline for four years.” ![medium 4](https://www.opendemocracy.net/content/files/2026/04/4_cropped_medium_osyIBIS-1776424224521.jpg) medium 4 Oceansurf 4 (cropped). *Please enlarge to see full image* “Sometimes it looks almost lunar – still, white, mysterious. At other times it’s wild, the boundary between land and sea forever shifting. There’s constant movement, constant transformation.” ![medium 5](https://www.opendemocracy.net/content/files/2026/04/5_cropped_medium_g2BuXMm-1776424224501.jpg) medium 5 Oceansurf 5 (cropped). *Please enlarge to see full image* “My aim is to suggest how we experience time – as a continual, moving, horizontal experience, scanning the landscape as we move through it.” ![medium 6](https://www.opendemocracy.net/content/files/2026/04/6_cropped_medium_VWitJYZ-1776424224485.jpg) medium 6 Oceansurf 6 (cropped). *Please enlarge to see full image* “I’m not trying to convey the the Cartier-Bresson split second in time, but the actual feeling of being in a place, walking through it across a period of time, a duration.” --- *A selection of Dominic Pote’s earlier work, including industrial landscapes, photographs of Prague and London, and the following images, can be viewed on his* [*website*](http://www.dominic-pote-photography.co.uk/?ref=opendemocracy.net)*.* ![medium 7](https://www.opendemocracy.net/content/files/2026/04/7_cropped_medium_shoreline_vgN9SmK-1776424224531.jpg) medium 7 Shorelines 5 (cropped). *Please enlarge to see full image* “The camera is hand-held, in line with my body. I don’t look through it with my eye. Sometimes I start off on my knees, or crawling, recording the landscape from different angles.” ![medium 8](https://www.opendemocracy.net/content/files/2026/04/8_cropped_medium_shoreline_3RnnZ0r-1776424224543.jpg) medium 8 Shorelines 3 (cropped). *Please enlarge to see full image* “The negatives are scanned - digitally printed, but not digitally manipulated. As long as I keep walking is as long as the picture lasts. I use a long exposure time and a long piece of film. Many of the photographs are three or four metres in length.” ![medium 9](https://www.opendemocracy.net/content/files/2026/04/9_cropped_medium_shoreline_ThbyjUf-1776424224604.jpg) medium 9 Shorelines 4 (cropped). *Please enlarge to see full image* “It’s less about the traditional eye-view than about the body’s experience, how it feels to be in time, and to be in a particular place. I’d like to convey that direct experience as much as possible.” ![medium 10](https://www.opendemocracy.net/content/files/2026/04/a10_cropped_medium_shoreline_IBZS97H-1776424224593.jpg) medium 10 Shorelines 6 (cropped). *Please enlarge to see full image* “Chance, the random event, happy accident, lucky mistake – a photograph owes a lot to that, and can be beautiful because of it. If I stumble, it’s on film.”