Issue 115 | October 7 - 21, 2022
Picturing Place
“What we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place. In this sense we would choose in most respects for thirty minutes with Edward Hopper’s painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street that was his subject; with Hopper’s vision we see more.”
-Robert Adams
I just got back from my first real trip in a long time. It was an exciting adventure from start to finish. From the butterflies I felt packing my camera gear before I left, to getting on a plane for the first time since the pandemic started, to touching down in a new place, to having multiple peak experiences during my travels around Colorado and Utah, and finally to being welcomed back to NYC by a genuinely insane taxi ride home from JFK with a driver who was utterly unable to see in the rain and dark and almost got us both killed or injured multiple times. It was an incredible trip, but it’s also so good to be back in NYC, and I’m grateful to have made it home alive.
I’ve been to Colorado and Utah before - My father was a geologist who worked in these areas, and as a family we’d travel out to his old stomping grounds for summer vacations in my childhood. I don’t know if it got too expensive, but those Western trips stopped when I became a teenager. I’ve made a couple trips back in the years since to visit a close friend who made a life out there, but It had been a long while since I returned, more than a decade. I took photos the last time I was there, but only as an enthusiastic amateur - I hadn’t yet become the photographer I am now, with my more demanding ambitions and aspirations about picture making.
Although some places were familiar, most of this trip was to new places and new hikes - The Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, Colorado National Monument outside Grand Junction, the high peaks surrounding Crested Butte, Colorado, camping on Cedar Mesa in Utah, and a hike through the hoodoos of Fisher Towers in Moab, Utah.
It’s an astonishingly beautiful landscape, and I wanted to make pictures that celebrated the beauty of the place, but I also wanted to try and make something new - pictures or sequences of photos I hadn’t seen before of these places.
I also wanted to explore a nascent idea I had about making pictures of the geology of this landscape - something that might connect me to my father and the geology work he did in the area.
This part of the world is almost all rocks and all kinds of rocks. You see and feel fragmented rocks, giant boulders, pebbles, slick rocks, sandy rocks, rocks that bounce your heavy car up and down like a plaything, billion-year-old rocks, million-year-old rocks, gentle rocks that support small desert plants, rock pools, worn down rocks, water-chiseled canyon rocks, massive rock walls and rock faces, mountains of solid rock, craggy fraggy draggy rocks, rocks splashed with colorful lichens, layer cake sedimentary rocks, dripped sand castle rocks, rocks that sparkle like the galaxies above, and so many more rocks.
And amidst all these rocks, you’re constantly confronted with scenes of staggering and monumental beauty. One of the primary challenges in photographing this place was just trying to convey these tremendous geological forms’ scale and living presence.
It’s an ancient landscape, and it’s a landscape that is very directly connected to the indigenous people who lived on the land far before Europeans set out to explore this land in the 1500s, people that still live there today. The spirits of the Ancestral Puebloans in Utah felt particularly present as we camped out on their mesa and hiked through canyons they once built cliff-dwelling homes in - homes that are startingly well-preserved a thousand years later. Of course, the descendants of these people are very much alive and well now too, a vital and vibrant part of the contemporary landscape of the West.
Alongside this profound land, and underneath the vivid stars and luminous clouds of the Milky Way, which sparkled as I never saw before, there’s also the slowly unfolding ecological and environmental disaster of contemporary American life spreading inexorably throughout the landscape. Ugly houses and developments blighting otherwise pristine views, ‘Trump won’ MAGA billboards, endless strip malls, enormous homes built in ski towns like Crested Butte that will only be occupied by their very wealthy owners a few months each year, and the ubiquitous ‘Don’s Johns’ that sit on recently purchased plots of land, a sign of the construction to come, and foundations soon to be poured.
Photographer Robert Adams documented this strip-mallification and housing development construction across Denver’s front range starting in 1968, and it was interesting to see on this trip how that process never stopped. Adams could work on a similar project today, showing just how far the juggernaut of capitalism and population growth had infringed onto the landscape since his early images. “Show affection for the world, but don’t lie about it.” Robert Adams said. It’s hard to show affection for some manmade intrusions that blight this beautiful land.
The friend I was visiting lives in a gentrifying ski town whose wealth and density increased sharply during the pandemic as rich people fled cities for mountain retreats like his. It’s a town entirely surrounded by supreme beauty, and yet I found it fascinating how my friend’s opinions of the place were so divided - half the time, he would enjoy the beauty with me. Yet, an almost equal amount of time was spent pointing out and decrying the changes and wealthy gentrification of the mountain town he’d lived in since the early 2000s (a place his partner had lived since the late 1980s). My friend’s job is running a conservation land trust. Throughout a lengthy career in this work, he’s preserved thousands of acres of land across Colorado, an accomplishment that hopefully tempers some of the angst and sadness he feels at all the places he and his organization weren’t able to preserve, all the areas still being despoiled by man’s encroachments.
I left Colorado with hundreds of photos, some on film, so I won’t see them for a while, and a lot of questions about how to make photos of places like this. Although my visit was for two weeks, it was also hectic, with hundreds of miles on the road and new places to explore almost every day.
I think my best photos from what I’ve seen in a quick review are probably just scenes of Western natural beauty - towering storm clouds illuminated by a setting sun one evening in Utah, the shimmering and intense yellow autumn Aspen forests in the high peaks of Colorado, and the sublime enormous rock forms of Utah.
I got some new ideas photographing this landscape, and I feel like some progress was made, but it all feels so developing and also very contingent on the immense support and help I got from my friends along the way.
I wouldn’t have gotten any photos without the expert guidance and advice of my local friend, who took my other pal and me on all the most adventurous and exciting parts of our journey. I’m unsure if I’ll ever have the skills or experience to explore the most interesting parts of these difficult and sometimes dangerous landscapes on my own, the way I’m able to explore NYC neighborhoods on my own.
He and the other friend I traveled with were also soooo gracious and patient with my frequent picture-making stops on the trail (and my many pauses to catch my breath - 11,500 feet really tests your lungs!) I’m so blessed and lucky that I had them as companions on this Western adventure.
I really want to investigate this land further. I’m eager to review my photos in more detail, and I think I did alright for one trip. But I suspect if your goal is describing a place, you must immerse yourself in many more than one visit. I have to go back soon. It can’t be another several years until my next trip. That’s the only way.
Class Announcement:
Starting Saturday, October 29, I'll be teaching a five-session online class called 'Questionable Pictures' that will explore the written and unwritten rules shaping the photography we create. Inspired by the book Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph (Jason Fulford, Aperture, 2021), we'll explore different ideas around aesthetic and style conventions and subject matter (what can we make pictures of and what shouldn't we make pictures of? Who comes up with all these rules anyway, and how can we subvert them?) By the end, we'll be a class full of rebels, celebrating all the rules we broke along the way.
Learn More / Signup: [here]
Photo at top of post - Fisher Towers, Utah 2022 by James Prochnik