(Click to Enlarge) I imagine that this is salt water with a Madrona, aka Madrone, I think, rooted in a small head on the right. Someone or thing has determined that Washington State has 2,337 miles of marine shoreline and most of that is inside the Strait of Juan de Fuca, here in our "Mediterranean of the West." (I read it in "Building Washington" and so can you. The entire book - excepting the sponsor's "vanity" section in the rear of the published five pound version - may be read on this blog. It is one of the five books accessed through the blog's front page button on "History Books.") Or is this one of those long lakes in the Canadian West or perhaps even in Patagonia? At least we can be confident that this grand place, unlike so many of Horace Sykes' other surprises, is not in Utah. The light is dimming and so is the efficiency of Sykes' lens. The focus is soft - almost intentionally like an early-century pictorialist landscape. Horace admired the pictoralist aesthetes when he was first learning photography late in the 19th century. It is possible for anyone with endurance to search the net and find at least one of Horace's early writings on photography - from 1914, I believe. It is a learned essay on how to make a pinhole camera that will give one pictorialist effects for portraiture and other subjects. Horace wrote well. Would that he had later also written captions for his "daily sykes" Kodachromes. We have often requested this for Sykes' unidentified subjects. Does anyone recognize this one - this pictorialist - but not surreal - dreamscape somewhere in the Americas?
