In the spring of 1996 I pushed off from the public boat ramp in the town of Green River, Utah, with two friends, three weeks of food, my two Nikon FM2 camera’s and 60 rolls of film. For the next 21 days we explored the length of Stillwater and Labyrinth Canyon’s; 120 river miles, and another hundred or more on foot up the Green River’s dendritic side canyons. I shot all my film, dropped one roll into the waterlogged bottom of our raft but managed to save it, and came out of the canyon country with a few dozen good shots and a hunger to shoot more.
(The Green River, from Green River Overlook, Canyonlands National Park, Utah)
It wasn’t my first trip to the Four Corners region. During the winter of 1993-94 I spent five months in the Southwest, first volunteering at Grand Canyon National Park as a Ranger Naturalist, and then down through southern Arizona and New Mexico, and back up through the high country around Santa Fe. But I was stupid, and was traveling light, so didn’t bring my real camera with me, just a tiny Olympus point-and-shoot.
Since my first trip down the Green River I’ve been back to Utah five times, including three other trips on that wonderful river, and a five-week-long exploration of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Zion National Park in western Utah. At the end of September Jenn and I spent two weeks in southern Utah and Northern Arizona; it was a powerfully creative time.
Photography is the art of bending light. The eye beholds the scene, and the heart longs to capture the beauty before you. The mind calculates how. The camera is the tool through which light passes and is recorded, for the longest time with silver on the film plane, and now through ones and zeros on the memory card. The light must bend through eye and heart, through head and lens, through bits and bytes to emerge transformed by the creative process on the screen, on the wall, on the print before our eyes once again.
The American southwest is one of my hearts true homes. It’s a joy to share it with you.
(Above, Jenn in Dry Fork Canyon, and below, descending into Peekaboo Gulch,
Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument, Utah)
(Jenn's shot of me in Spooky Gulch, and my lay-down on your back shot of Dry Fork Canyon,
Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument, Utah)
(It's a tight squeeze in Spooky Gulch, and it got even tighter. I set the ISO at 1600 so I could hand hold the camera in the low light of Spooky Gulch, above and below)
(Jenn in Dry Fork Canyon above, and below, moonrise and Balanced Rock,
Arches National Park, Utah)
(Above, Canyonlands National Park looking towards the La Sal Mountains, and below, a storm trails over the The White Rim of Island in the Sky, Canyonlands National Park, Utah)
(Sunset from Cape Royal, North Rim, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona)
(Standing Rock, above, near The Maze, Canyonlands National Park, and below, Jenn's shot of me in a cave formed from massive slabs of sandstone in the Doll's House region of Canyonlands.)
