Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Retaining The Wing Wall



Hilary Dee took this lovely photo of our 'wing wall', an unusual dry stone retaining wall we built in Gualala three years ago. 

It's an iPhone 'pano' shot, which in its original image size, doesn't fit inside this blog page in horizontal format, hence, the photo is stacked vertically.

The thing is, most walls are generally hard to photograph in their entirely without special lenses or some sort of visual digital manipulation . And, even if captured all in one photograph   they're hard to display on screen or in books.

Instead, a wall, when it gets long enough needs to start telling a story rather than trying to lend itself to one defining photo. Some longer walls, if you can walk their length (or even part of their length) give a resulting impression or image which ends up being more accurate and stays with you longer than any photograph.

I often 'go' for long walls. I learn a lot about them from walking their length. And after, I enjoy experiencing them in my mind's eye. That way they stay with me longer.

Retaining walls is a good thing to practice.