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landscape, but a severely restricted one. disastrously violently narrowed landscape.

confinement

my eye first goes to the two boys, a gaze channeled by those converging walls, a displaced reminder of all the walls of Gaza and Palestine.  The boys are split, cut by the line of the horizon. then the garbage, on its way to the sea, if it ever gets there. the frozen seagulls suggest the only motion, but it's a chaotic motion that goes nowhere.  You can't see left or right; those walls seem new and sturdy and uncrumbled, built to last.  The garbage was there but I focused on it last, I think.

oh, emotional.  But where the caption recuperates some positive readings centered on the boys, I confess I can't or at least didn't see it: it doesn't suggest anything about leisure or joy to me, even if fleeting, although I recognize the possibility.  It's all about the experience of confinement, and the sea offers no escape or comfort.

I read this image as a collection of toxic relations made visible through the presence of the debris in the foreground.Block the lower half of the image: two boys stand on some indeterminate small-scale structure, modest waves crashing beneath them, looking out past a flock of gulls to an endless sea. Thus framed, the image is historically and socially difficult to situate. There is life (the gulls), desire (the kids), freedom (the sea).

I'm struck by the powerful relations that the trash/debris/waste in the foreground activates within this image. There's something powerful about the presence of trash within the frame of an image that belongs to a genre (seascape) from which this kind of trash would conventionally be carefully excluded. It reorganizes, grounds, and unlocks of the politics of the entire scene.

Per my previous comments, it might be interesting to juxtapose this image with a version cropped horizontally at the point where the sea meets the rocks below the childrens' feet. It strikes me that this cropped image might bear a striking similarity to the fantasy seascapes portrayed in a couple of the Banksy works in the other image in this essay. As the trash bears a similarity to the wall / debris surrounding those Banksy works in the other image.

Broken