Her grandfather walks the beach with her. This is not a little stroll to water’s edge to watch her swim kind of walk. They walk for kilometres down the beach. He walks, she sprints ahead, she finds something absolutely enthralling in the sand and stops to dig it out; he walks. She runs ahead to try and chase the sand pipers; he walks. She is a like a rubber band that is attached to him; first stretching far out behind, then shooting back to him. It is a relationship that is characterized by love and trust but with enough freedom to breathe.

Sometimes it takes more than one image to tell the story. I saw these two walking on the beach in Panama and I loved what appeared to be the casual yet clearly close nature of their relationship. I wanted illustrate this relationship and I felt that I couldn’t really do that with just a single image. The whole thing was too much to squeeze into one image or at least I am not a good enough photographer to see a way to do that. So I settled on a little triptych that would work together to tell the story.

-Russell Berg