Immersing himself in the dense, shimmering fog of a Pacific Northwest morning, Dave Coyle found a sign—not just any sign, but one as emotionally pointed as it was physically real. Caught in a palette of soft purples and blues, plastic letters on what might be a church or business announcement board spelled out: “Yesterday You Said Tomorrow.” For Coyle, this image tells the whole story.
“It was yesterday when you said tomorrow you’re going to start, you’re going to get your act together, you’re going to quit drinking—all these things. And then tomorrow comes and you find another excuse to have another drink or push something else off till tomorrow,” he explains. “That summed up the burden of inaction that I was carrying around. I woke up each Monday feeling like I was on this ride that I couldn’t get off of, that it was just the same loop. And so, the image hit me and it all came together very quickly.” The sign became the title of Coyle’s atmospheric narrative of finding one’s way through the fog of inner struggles.
In January of 2021, Coyle made a simple resolution, to take one photograph a day. Little did he know at the time that it would open up a whole new world to him, changing his life. He started off making images with his phone before moving on to a digital camera, explaining that “it started to click for me and it felt like a way that I could find time for myself. I would go out and shoot early in the morning, be creative, and recharge. I was hooked.” The series that evolved out of this morning routine, Yesterday You Said Tomorrow, is filled with mysterious, meditative landscape images, “The work came out of a need to find closure. It’s a reminder for me, personally, of that time that I experienced and the emotion I still feel. It’s very fresh and almost tangible.”
Coyle’s struggles with alcohol date back to college when he received a football scholarship to the University of Oregon. He recalls the shock of that time, the dislocation he experienced. “I got to college and I became overwhelmed in every area. I’m an only child who grew up in a small town. I arrived and the game was overwhelming for me,” he remembers. “College was overwhelming, the whole thing. I hadn’t had a lot of adversity in my life, up until that point, and I didn’t handle it well. And that’s when alcohol kicked in.” An injury ended his college football experience and left him reeling. Struggling with depression he left university three units short of graduating.
“I carried that weight up until recently. I was still high-functioning, had a nice career, an amazing family, but I was carrying this weight with alcohol, and it just continued to go on. When I got to that point where I became a stay-at-home dad, it became even more magnified. I needed to take action,” he explains. “Over the past six or seven years, I had stopped and started drinking several times. I would take a three-month break and start to feel amazing. And I would think, ‘I can reintroduce alcohol, it’s not going to be an issue, I’ve got it figured out this time.’ Without question, I would end up in the same spot, except feeling a little bit worse. I wanted to start again with something very meaningful and important for me.”
And so he found a foothold with photography, going out in the early morning before his young children were awake. Alone as dawn seeped across the landscape, he found a bit of himself emerging in the quiet hours of the day. “It’s my time to reflect. I think that’s my slightly introverted only-child way of having my own time,” he explains. “Something catches my eye, it’s a form of moving meditation, and then nothing else matters. I have blinders on. I’m focused on what’s grabbed my attention.”
Moving between cool, burning colors and black and white, the photographs are impressionistic at times, sharp at others. An almost neon blue spider web glows against a mauve and purple sky. An orange pinprick of sun is suspended in the soft pink mist hanging over green fields. A road curves off into the descent, captured in a car’s side mirror. Lights appear on dark streets, windows glow in gold or red hues, and clouds hang low.
As he photographed, Coyle found inspiration in American Tonalism, a soft-edged, ethereal style of painting that emerged in the late 1800s, associated with James McNeil Whistler, George Innes, and even seeping into photography in the work of Edward Steichen. The photographs of Todd Hido and Jungjin Lee also proved influential as he reflected on the meditative quiet of the landscape.
The moody, cinematic scenes of Yesterday You Said Tomorrow are punctuated by titles that hold a sense of self-recrimination. So Here We Go Again? Maybe Today? Tripping on What’s Behind Me, all taken from a poem that he wrote whilst photographing for the project. The theme of ‘negative self-talk’ manifests in lights just out of reach, windows aglow, and a figure staring off into the distance. But at the end of these emerges a clarity, signified by images titled Out of the Fog, Taking the First Step.
The sense of relief that this creative outlet has given Coyle is empowering. He hopes “the work resonates with people and maybe gets them to slow down and try to take in the whole picture. It would be the biggest compliment that I could ever receive if in seeing my work, someone is inspired to take action, to do something that makes them feel good, that gives them a similar creative outlet.”
What Coyle achieves with his series is to take the interior murk that we can all relate to and give it external form. Who has not criticized and disappointed themselves? Who has not struggled through an inner fog? Yet in each image, there is a light, a path, a space for reflection, or a hint of something down the road. It can be hard not to sound clichéd when talking about what art can do, how it can heal. For all of its community, beauty, and good, it is so often a world that can be judgemental, trend-focused, and deeply entwined with money and power. And yet, on occasion, art can be a lifesaver, showing us our true selves, leading us out of the fog and into a new day, brighter with possibility, if we allow ourselves to take the first step.
Editor’s note: We discovered David Coyle’s work via LensCulture’s Emerging Talent Awards 2023, where it was recognized as a special Juror’s Pick. Follow this link to see all 25 winners of this year’s Emerging Talent Awards.