Cape Town Light and the End of Something

Another summer gone before I figured out what I was supposed to do with it. All the trips not taken, the afternoons spent inside when the light was doing something outside, the mornings I killed online instead of at the water. Autumn arrives with that specific cruelty of making everything feel retrospectively possible.

Some people used the heat better. Henrik Purienne loaded his Citroën and drove to the coast to photograph Shané van der Westhuizen—South African model, apparently genuinely obsessed with the ocean—for the Australian label Zulu & Zephyr. He works in bleached film and afternoon light, shooting the kind of images that look like memories you don’t quite have yet. The collection is called "Cape Town," after the city where this particular quality of light lives: where the sun is warm, the ocean murky, and the beach alive.

Shané on rocks. Shané in the car. Shané at the waterline where the cold water hits. Purienne always finds that register between documentary and dream, and she moves through his frames like someone who belongs in them. You believe she’s actually in love with the ocean. You believe the whole thing.

I keep coming back to these pictures at the beginning of September when the warmth is almost gone and the light has changed and there’s nothing left to do about it. That’s what they’re for.