Almost
2009
I was nine years old the first time I saw Africa. I did not travel there. I looked at it from a school trip to the Costa del Sol, from a hill near Tarifa where a teacher told us to look right, and there it was: the Atlas Mountains of northern Morocco, visible across the Strait of Gibraltar on a clear morning in a way that made the continent feel simultaneously close enough to touch and entirely beyond reach. I remember understanding, with the particular clarity that children bring to things that surprise them, that I was looking at somewhere I had never been and might never go.
That moment stayed with me for thirty years. Almost is its consequence.
In 2008, beginning in Cádiz and travelling south toward the strait, I pointed the camera across the water and photographed what I could see. The distance between the Spanish coast and the African shore ranges from fourteen kilometres at its narrowest to several times that further west. In clear conditions the Moroccan coastline is visible from the Spanish side as a low dark presence on the horizon, something between fact and atmosphere, something the eye accepts as land without being able to confirm it. In other conditions it disappears entirely. The photographs record both: the days when Africa is almost visible, and the days when it is only almost there.
Each image in the series carries an annotation: the measured distance between the camera position and the African coast. I was interested in the relationship between those two things, the number and the image. The number is precise. Fourteen kilometres is fourteen kilometres. The image is not precise at all. It shows haze, light, the surface of the sea, something in the distance that might be mountains or might be cloud. The annotation makes the gap measurable. The photograph makes it feel immeasurable. They describe the same distance and arrive at completely different conclusions about what that distance is.
This is the condition I have always found most interesting in photography. The medium claims precision, indexical fidelity, the accurate recording of what stood in front of the lens. But what stood in front of the lens in these photographs is the limit of visibility itself, the point where the world becomes too distant or too atmospheric or too ambiguous for the camera to resolve. Photography, pointed at its own horizon, records its own failure to reach what it is pointing at. That failure is not incidental. It is the subject.
Sartre argued in The Imaginary that we can perceive qualities of objects that are not directly before us because the imagination fills what the senses cannot reach. I would go further: the imagination is most active precisely where the senses fall short. The hazy presence of Africa in these photographs generates a kind of seeing that a clear, detailed, unambiguous photograph of the Moroccan coast could never produce. The indistinction is generative. The almost is more productive than the arrival.
The Strait of Gibraltar is not a neutral stretch of water. It is one of the most crossed and most uncrossable bodies of water in the world, depending entirely on who is attempting the crossing and from which direction. From the European side, looking south, what you see is a landscape of historical memory and geographical curiosity: the edge of the known world, the beginning of the unknown one. From the African side, looking north, the same distance has a different weight entirely. The photographs were made facing south. That direction, and not the other, is where my curiosity lay. I was aware, making them, that the distance I was mourning as a limitation of the camera was the same distance other people were crossing in conditions I was not in, and that this asymmetry was part of what the project contained even if it was not what the project showed.
Almost is a series of photographs of what photography cannot quite reach. The camera is pointed at a continent. The continent is there. It is fourteen kilometres away, or thirty, or obscured by weather, or present as a shadow on the horizon that the eye accepts and cannot confirm. The image records the attempt. The annotation records the fact. Between them is the gap that interests me most: the distance between what we can measure and what we can see, between the world as it is and the world as it reaches us.
I was nine. Africa was there. Almost.
