Cable Beach is a place of extraordinary beauty, but it is not a gentle one. During the wet season, box jellyfish can be present in the water; saltwater crocodiles and sharks occasionally pass through. Swimming is therefore not something everyone takes for granted. And yet, every evening, locals and visitors drive onto the vast beach, often with a picnic, to watch the sun disappear into the Indian Ocean. I was there one evening in April, drawn by the extraordinary intensity of the light. Cable Beach faces directly west, giving the setting sun an uninterrupted path across the ocean. The atmosphere can carry dust and moisture, deepening the colours and slowing the transition from light to darkness. That evening, the sky seemed almost to become a physical substance.
Orange is not a colour I naturally seek in my work. Yet that evening it was impossible to ignore. It filled the sky with such density and force that I found myself simply watching it first, waiting for the best moment.
My work often begins from above, photographed from helicopters and light aircraft, where the landscape can lose its familiar references and move towards abstraction. But the sea can offer the same kind of freedom. Looking at water, especially at the edge of land, I find the same possibility of dissolving scale, distance and place.
For this image, I used intentional camera movement, holding the horizon as steadily as possible while moving the camera horizontally. The waves became elongated bands of colour and light. Their reflections were caught again in the wet sand, creating the more stable, grounded band at the bottom of the frame.
The process was a balance between control and surrender. Too much movement and the image lost its structure; too little and the water remained recognisable as water. I made several attempts, searching for the precise point where the landscape would begin to disappear without completely losing its presence.
This was the frame where everything finally held together: the intense orange of the sky, the dark movement of the sea, the horizontal rhythm of the waves and the reflection anchored in the sand. The place is still there, it no longer needed to be recognised as Cable Beach. It’s a landscape on the edge of abstraction.
