The week after taking the 'Staso' photos I went back to the Spit. I was happy with the photos I had, but went back 'for fun' this time, and I had this outlandish idea that perhaps I could find the Staso brick and bring it home.
The photo above is what I found on my return. This is the same beach as in the Staso/Grey photo, looking in the opposite direction, but in the week between the photos the trucks and bulldozers had been doing their work. The old beach with all of its small, smooth stones is being layered over with new rubble. I took a number of photos of the new terrain, looked around a bit, and then moved on to other areas.
In completing my 2011 series, I had decided that I wanted to apply what I had learned from creating this project to a new one. About bricks. From the Spit. But this time I'm going to have more control over the lighting, equipment, and environment. In photography the little things are critical, but big ones are profound. For example, when I was working on the photos last summer, I was using a convenient concrete block as a shooting table. It wasn't quite level, so not only did all of my subjects need to stand on their own, they needed to do it against a slope. This non-photographic requirement fundamentally changed the project, but it won't be an issue this time around.
So for this trip to the Spit I was gathering raw material in the most literal way. I spent the day taking photos and inspecting bricks, picking out some interesting ones to bring home. It was a successful day all around.
And on the way back home I found my brick.
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