Why point the camera down? It’s the anti-selfie. The ground is what we can’t help but share. The ground is held in common and it holds us in common. The ground catches everything, records the evidence, receives all of us eventually. And it is in constant (slow) motion, accumulating and eroding, taking or being given new shape. The ground has depth we struggle to imagine and a surface to which gravity intimately binds us. Once when I was a kid a friend told me, “You’re always looking at the ground. It’s sad.” But there is so much to see there: litter, animal tracks, tree leavings, rock and concrete, new growth, human marks, running water, boundary lines, pattern and accident, sign and trace of almost everything.
