Running at Point Conception, California, 1987, unfolds as a surge of youth across the glistening strand, a loose pack of men cutting diagonally through the frame as if breaking away from an invisible starting line.

Their strides are nearly synchronized yet never identical, each runner carrying his own rhythm, his own breath, while the wet sand mirrors their bodies in trembling reflections that the next wave will erase.

The men run stripped of insignia and uniform, anonymous and unbranded, which intensifies their physical presence and the sense that they might be anyone on the cusp of becoming something more.

The photograph becomes a moving study of anatomy, a sequence of naked bodies reduced to essential lines of bone, tendon and muscle, articulated by light with almost clinical precision.

What resonates is the equilibrium between freedom and demand: bare feet slapping at the edge of the Pacific, lungs open to the salt air, bodies pushed forward by something both internal and unseen.

Point Conception hovers behind them as a dark, almost mythic headland, holding the horizon in a long, low arc against which their motion appears both fragile and defiantly alive.