Book excerpt: Clifford Ross's Wave Music by photographer Clifford Ross, opens with explosive images of stormy seas and skies--photographs taken on the edge of hurricanes. This series presents gorgeous, formalist slices of nature at her most tempestuous and romantic. As Wave Music progresses, however, the focus tightens with increasing obsession on the processes and materials of the photographic medium. The Hurricane series is followed by Horizons, classically composed images of sky and quiet surf, and finally, by images of pure photographic grain. The Grain pictures are pure abstractions--tonal fields of grey. Each Grain image echoes the tones seen in the previous two series and addresses the very stuff of black-and-white photography itself. In Wave Music, Clifford Ross provides an incredible, heuristic journey, from the ecstatic formalism of ocean waves to the abstract sublime of pure light. Underlying each of the series and providing a unifying thread, are shifting elements of gesture, composition, and tone. Each of the images is exquisitely reproduced in tritone.