PEGADA

The north wind was running at fifty kilometres an hour and my hands had stopped working properly. Seven in the morning. This is exactly what I am there for.

Then the sky split. Storm holding on one side, and on the other something opening. Blue, impossible, arriving anyway. The sun came up behind the half that was still black, and for a few minutes the wave was lit from below while everything above it stayed dark.

I have worked this coast for years. It gave me that morning once.

Two hundred steps cut into the cliff, half a circle, steep enough that you keep one hand on the rock. Halfway down the trees open and the beach appears all at once. Sand, water, no way in from anywhere else.

When I stopped to photograph it there was a bride and a groom down there, and their photographer, and nobody else. Winter. They had the whole coast to themselves.

I took the picture and stood there a while longer than I needed to. I remember thinking that when my turn comes, I want it to look like this.

I had arrived alone a day earlier. I did not know a single person there. I had rented the apartment without seeing it and I did not know what was at the end of my own street.

The first morning I went out to find the beach. What I found was a small piece of ground that seemed to belong to nobody, cold water, almost turquoise, and no one on it.

The footprints in the sand are mine. That was the morning I knew I had come to the right place.

No electricity. No fresh water. No roads. The island opens to visitors a few months a year, and for the rest of it only the fishermen are allowed to land.

I went with a friend whose family has fished this water for seven generations. We stayed a week. We cooked on the ground, slept in tents under an open sky, and did not speak to anyone outside the island.

By the third day something in you goes quiet. You stop waiting for the light and start noticing that it has already arrived. This was taken at the far end of the high ground, where crops were once grown and nothing is left now.

There is a stillness on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic that I have not found anywhere since.

I met this cave at night, from a boat, with a Portuguese friend who is family to me. He knows places on this coast that only someone born here would know.

The plankton was glowing in the black water and it was extraordinary. I told him I had to come back in daylight. I needed to actually see it.

In the morning we came through an opening barely wider than the boat. Cold stone, complete darkness, and then light at the far end of it. He held the back of my shirt while I lay over the side, upside down, as low to the water as I could get.

I still look at this one on bad days.

This is the one I like most. The bay curves, and there is a point in it where the water is neither deep nor shallow. That is where the wave stands up. I wanted it from a place nobody shoots from.

The wave is four hundred metres away. I carried a small ladder into the water and stood on it with a 600mm lens, so that the wave and I would be on exactly the same line. The curve of the bay is what makes that possible.

It looks like I am inside the water. And the sun was behind it, so it went transparent. A green you cannot manufacture by any other means.

The bay is called Consolação, which means consolation. People came to that black sand for generations to be healed by it. I did not know any of that when I chose the spot.

I took this lying flat on the ground at the edge of a cliff. Standing on a cliff gives you the height your eyes already expect. I wanted a different one.

Seventy kilometres of coastline and one person on it, facing the sun. That was all.

A sunset is a beautiful thing but it is often a sad one. Something ending rather than starting. This one was not. If a day can finish like that, tomorrow is going to be better.

I lived in a van and moved between beaches. When there was lightning I started the engine and drove towards it. It never mattered where I would end up, only what I would see when I got there.

This one I found at the end of a dead-end street, facing a storm that was lighting the whole sky every few seconds. On a long exposure I caught it touching the water, behind the only buildings for miles.

Everything had been black. Then it all turned purple.

Complete darkness. I wore a head torch just to see how many seconds the shutter had been open.

I stood where the lagoon meets the sea, barefoot on a dune that was still warm. Then I sat down and waited in total silence, with no idea what the exposure would give me.

It gave me the waves in white, the stars still in the sky, and the exact line where fresh water touches salt.