A 3:1 panoramic photograph of the vermilion torii gate standing in Lake Biwa at Shirahige Shrine, Takashima, Japan, available as a limited edition print in three sizes.
The torii at Shirahige stands in the water about fifty feet out from the shore of Lake Biwa. The morning I photographed it there was no sun, no mist, and no drama of any kind. Flat cloud, a little ripple on the surface, and the far shore barely darker than the sky above it.
Almost nothing in that frame has any color in it. I measured it later out of curiosity: across the whole picture the saturation averages fifteen percent, which is close to a black and white photograph. The gate is at sixty-four.
The color has a name, shu, and it used to have a chemistry. Shrine vermilion was made from cinnabar, which is mercury sulfide. Mercury is poisonous to the fungi that rot wood and to the insects that bore into it, so painting a wooden structure with vermilion preserved it. On something standing in a lake, that mattered.
The same color was also understood to be the color of the sun and of fire, a life force, and a thing that turned away sickness and ill intent. Those two facts sat together comfortably for a long time. The paint kept the rot out and the paint kept the harm out, and nobody had to choose which one was doing it.
This gate went up in the twentieth century and whatever is on it now is modern paint. The mercury is gone. The color stayed.
Horizon Gate is a picture with almost no color in it and one saturated object standing in the middle, and the reason it is that color is that the color was once a chemical argument as well as a spiritual one.
Shirahige Shrine, Takashima, Shiga Prefecture, Japan, in flat overcast light. This is a single frame image. The shrine sits on the west shore of Lake Biwa, the largest freshwater lake in Japan, and its offshore torii is the only one standing in that lake. The ridge across the background is the far side of the lake.
The photograph has no black in it and no white. Measured across the frame, nothing reaches either end of the scale, and the entire picture occupies a band about a third as wide as the range available to it. That is what distance through humid air does: the atmosphere scatters light into the shadows and out of the highlights until everything converges toward the middle.
The surface is moving. The ripple is small and the reflection under the gate breaks into short horizontal fragments rather than holding as a mirror.
This photograph contains no black and no white. Everything in it sits in the middle of the range, and nothing reaches either end. What that produces on a wall is a piece with no glare and no hole in it. A picture with strong highlights competes with a lamp and a window; a picture with deep blacks opens a dark aperture in a wall. This one does neither. It sits at roughly the brightness of a mid-tone wall and stays there, which makes it one of the easier pieces in the collection to hang in a room where the light is uneven or changes through the day.
It is also carrying almost no color, which makes the small amount it has behave differently than the quantity suggests. Measured across the frame the saturation averages fifteen percent, roughly a third of the other panoramas in this collection, and all of the color that exists is concentrated in one object occupying a small share of the width. The eye judges color against its surroundings, so the vermilion reads far stronger than the measurement, and it will do that in almost any room. What it means practically is that this is a piece that introduces a single point of color rather than a palette, and it will carry a red into a room that has none without asking the room to answer it.
The third thing is that the subject sits near the center of a very wide frame with a great deal of empty water on either side. That emptiness is the composition rather than a shortage of one, and it means the piece needs to be centered on its wall rather than pushed to one side. Off-center it reads as though the wall cropped it. Centered, the space to the left and right of the gate does the same thing on the wall that it does in the picture.
Related reading: Where Attention Holds: The Quiet Pull of Soft Fascination
All three sizes shown to scale, aligned left and sharing a center line.
This photograph is offered in three sizes and four presentations, from $700 to $12,900. Full pricing across all sizes and presentations.
Each edition closes permanently once filled.
Not sure which size the room calls for, or want dimensions not listed here? Sizes beyond 90 × 30 are available on request and ship crated by freight. That conversation is welcome before an order is placed. Start that conversation and I will answer within one business day.
At the Intimate size the picture is thirty-six inches across and twelve inches tall, and this photograph tolerates that better than most because it is composed of one shape against an empty field. There is no fine structure to lose across the water or the sky, since there is almost nothing there to begin with. What goes is the gate itself, which is small in the frame to start with and becomes a red mark at twelve inches tall rather than a structure with legs and a crossbeam and a plaque hanging from it. The far ridge also flattens into a single line rather than the layered profile it actually is. The Collected at sixty by twenty is where the gate becomes architecture again. If you are weighing a size against a specific wall, choosing the right print size covers the measurements and the viewing distances in more detail.
The gate becomes a built thing. At ninety by thirty the joinery resolves: the two main pillars separate from the four angled struts bracing them, the crossbeam shows its upward curve at each end as a curve rather than a taper, and the dark plaque hanging at the center of the beam reads as an object with an edge. The paint itself becomes visible as a surface with wear on it rather than a flat field of red. Below the waterline the reflection separates into individual short fragments broken by the ripple, so you can see that the water is moving and roughly how fast. Across the background the far shore resolves into overlapping ridges at different distances, each one slightly paler than the one in front of it. Why scale matters covers what happens perceptually when a landscape reaches the size where the eye has to cross it.
Rooms that are quiet and rooms that are busy, for different reasons. In a restrained room the vermilion is the one event, and the piece supplies a focal point without supplying a scheme. In a room with a lot going on, the vast desaturated field of water and sky acts as a rest, which is a job most photographs cannot do because most photographs are full of things. It hangs at ordinary height, since the horizon sits near the middle of the frame rather than low, and it wants a wall wide enough that the piece is not touching anything at either end. Avoid hanging it above something with a strong vertical, a tall lamp or a narrow cabinet, because a second vertical near the gate competes with the only vertical the picture has. When your mind needs to rest takes the question further.
Every work ships insured and arrives with a signed certificate of authenticity.
If a piece is damaged in transit, the choice of replacement is always yours, and your edition number stays with you.
Production time runs 2 to 3 weeks for metal, 3 to 4 weeks for acrylic and paper, and 5 to 6 weeks for framed work.
Collector Edition of 25 · Lumachrome TruLife Acrylic · Handcrafted Italian Frame
TruLife acrylic in a handcrafted Italian frame with a linen liner chosen for the image. Frame series, finish, and liner are settled with you after the order, and production begins from there. The frame and liner add about fourteen inches to the finished dimensions, worth allowing for when planning placement.
Signature Edition of 50 · Lumachrome TruLife Acrylic · Gallery Float Mount
Face-mounted to TruLife acrylic and floated approximately one inch from the wall, with no frame to mediate between the image and the room. UV-resistant, anti-reflective, and scratch-resistant, with a lifetime guarantee against fading.
Signature Edition of 50 · ChromaLuxe Metal Print · Gallery Float Mount
Color infused into the aluminum panel itself, floated from the wall on a concealed system. Where acrylic produces luminosity, metal produces clarity. Exceptional fade resistance with no glazing or coating required.
Fine Art Edition of 100 · Hahnemühle Baryta Fine Art Paper
Printed without acrylic, so light meets the paper surface directly. Highlights stay luminous, shadows keep their nuance, and the surface has a tactile quality the other presentations approach differently. The understated choice, and the traditional one.
Complimentary shipping within the continental United States. International collector shipping available upon request.
Still deciding
Designing for Stillness
A guide to choosing art for restorative spaces
How to tell whether an image will still hold you in a year, how scale changes what a photograph does in a room, and how to match a piece to the work a room actually performs. It cites the research it draws on, and it is equally clear about where that research stops. About ten minutes to read.