California Coast California Coast

Battery Survivors

A coastal defense emplacement on the bluffs of San Mateo County, photographed in the early evening of an October day when the marine layer had cleared. The structure dates from the Second World War — one of a series of gun emplacements constructed along the Pacific coast to defend against naval attack. It was decommissioned after the war and has since been subjected to decades of the particular attention that abandoned structures receive from graffitists.

At this hour and in this light the structure reads as something geological — the concrete of the bunker and the sandstone of the bluff have become the same colour. The graffiti, which in daylight is chaotic and unresolved, has at this hour the quality of ancient mark-making. The camera cannot be blamed for that; the light can.