"life's a beach"_

A few months ago I took a photograph in a hospital. It is unremarkable; a dull image of an uninviting room. But I wanted to write about this photograph, more specifically, about the photograph contained within it: a small print, unframed, taped onto the wall of this otherwise bare space. The dark image stands out against the pale but recognisable features of the room: white fissured ceiling tiles, fluorescent tube lighting, speckled pastel blue PVC flooring and a well-worn, sand-coloured leather reclining chair. It is a photograph of windswept coastal dunes, a common motif in care settings, where images of sandy beaches and mostly calm, sunny skies fill lonely waiting areas, long hallways and sterile rooms. This image was different. There is the print’s curious position on the wall, which I initially thought was incredibly clumsy, if not careless. It hangs some way above eye level, placed just above a flat rectangular protrusion with similar dimensions to a door that reaches down to the ground. The print appears to rest, ever so slightly off centre, on its narrow ledge. Two loose cables, one black, the other light grey, emerge from a socket in the ceiling above the print. Rather than hanging straight down, they trail off to the left where they cut across the top corner of the print and sit improbably on the protruding panel in an upside-down ‘y’ formation. Perhaps it was the cables, drawn to the side like curtains to offer an unobstructed view of the coastal scene, that made me want to reconsider the print and its singular presentation. The image is framed by a bright white border, betraying a home printer. Ordinarily these types of scenes are printed onto large canvases, where they wrap around the sides of and disappear behind the underlying frame, a presentation that in all its coarseness is much more true to its subject. Often installed in series, these photographs are available in large numbers in homeware stores, where they are sold next to artificial plants and word art. They are also usually bright and cheerful, including the sun in one way or the other, coming up, going down, shining bright. This small photograph is dominated by an inky sky. The beach grasses in the foreground have been pulled violently off to the right, flattened over time by strong gales. At the horizon the sea is almost black, mirroring the colour of a landmass to the left. Wispy elongated clouds sweep across the top of the print, running, in opposite direction to the grasses, from what comes next. There is a foreboding quality to this photograph, making its presence in this hospital room even more incongruous. Almost cruel. Almost. There is also something very honest about this photograph, the stormy landscape beyond it, and the way it has been attached to the wall, with the cables thoughtfully draped to one side, to give us a clear view of the way thing really are.