The White Sea Coast

A windy shore: a Pomor village of unpainted log houses, nets drying on poles, rowing boats hauled up onto the shingle. The sky is overcast and the light is diffuse and cold — on the northern coast it is like this most of the year.

Above the village stands a wooden tented church with a separate tented bell tower. The logs have gone dark from wind and salt, and the church is darker than the houses only in silhouette.

The village occupies the left third of the frame; to the right there are no buildings at all — only open grey-green sea and haze. This is the one subject in the series where the position of the houses was fixed in advance across the width: the empty right-hand part is not a flaw of the composition but the reason the frame exists.