Flipping through a box of postcards and 4×6 prints, this one is different. The photo is off-centre, with a wide right margin. The paper is creamy, matte, a slight sheen on the dark parts of the print. These two dark areas dominate the composition: a vertical zone covering the full height of the left edge; and a horizontal zone coming in from the right about two-thirds of the way up and spanning much of the width.

The vertical element is a craggy rock face. The horizontal element is the most defined landmass in the image, the mountainous shoreline past which further ridges recede atmospherically. It rises from water textured with regular waves; a few more prominent lines where currents run into one another break up the monotony.

There’s an intrusion in the bottom-right part of the image, its presence in the actual scene not entirely making sense. An upright white triangle with its vague and disproportionate pseudo-reflection trailing down, echoed by a quarter of a white circle below, hard against the bottom edge.

For lack of something more certain I would’ve called it a sailboat. Who knows how tall a mast, but it’s placed in a way that if we could tell, it would give scale to the scene.

Human presence too, otherwise lacking. The photographer must be shooting from the same rock formation that fills the left edge, but it’s so steep and jagged that it’s hard to picture what this observer’s vantage point might look like. There’s maybe a tiny plant budding halfway up, the only evidence that life can be sustained here.

The scene makes more sense as a postcard image if we accept that a tall white triangle against dark water is a sailboat, indistinct and trailed by conflicting visual artefacts though it may be. I think, holding the photo, that I wish it wasn’t there compromising the negative space.

But this isn’t actually a commercial postcard, right? It’s someone’s print on decent paper that has a number and a few lines for an address on the back. A tourist shop product would at least be marked with the location and an identification of the printer.

I keep flipping through through the box, papers that probably came from the same place as this image but are unremarkable. Then not long after, the same exposure.

This one’s on glossy Agfa paper that has better retained its whiteness through the years, but the image either has faded or was underexposed to begin with compared to the first print. The frame is again shifted to the left of the paper, though the margins are narrower, exposing more, further emphasizing the rock face.

Crucially, there is no sign of the ghost ship. This is how I’d thought I would prefer the composition, but now it’s stuck in my head as something that’s missing.

Both prints must be from the same negative. There are bright spots in the water that haven’t budged, certain similarities in the ripples. So the “sailboat” is just something that went a bit wrong with liquid or light in the darkroom.

The fully-realized version of this photo must be somewhere else, far away from the box with this volatile, compromised version and this pale, flat one.