WHAT THE ROAD PASSES BY

THERE’S MORE TO A LANDSCAPE THAN AN ICONIC VANTAGE POINT

How long the road is. But for all the time the journey has already taken, how you have needed every second of it in order to learn what the road passes by.

– DAG HAMMARSKJOLD, MARKINGS

When I first started making photographs, I was an avid backpacker. I was energized by my explorations and the beauty I saw, and I wanted to share my treks with friends and family. As is the case for anyone starting out, my photographs were merely a beginner’s efforts. My subjects were the mountains of Glacier National Park, which are full of photographic potential, but my enthusiasm for my subject matter far outweighed my ability to convey the emotions of my experiences in the resulting images.

The main excitement of making my photographs was in showing where I had been. I was nineteen, I had fallen in love with being in the mountain wilderness, and I felt like everyone should see their magnificence. So initially, it was the ability of photographs to illustrate my adventures that got me hooked on photography. Any deeper motivations for making photographs were unknown to me at that early stage. I was content to make descriptive snapshots as excuses to tell my friends stories about my backpacking trips.

Not long after my first efforts in Glacier, I moved to Yosemite and began photographing in earnest. As I became more serious about my photography, I photographed Yosemite intensely, as well as all around the country, mostly in other National Parks and well-known landscape photography destinations, such as New England. I also traveled to photograph in India, Bhutan, Tibet, and China. Slowly, my skills developed as an artist, and I found that I was always finding exciting images no matter how far from home or the road I was. I began to put less emphasis on how exotic or remote the location was, and more emphasis on cultivating the perception to find beauty near at hand, where others would pass it, and then to photograph it uniquely.

I have been told that many of my favorite Yosemite images look like they could have been taken anywhere, that they don’t immediately say “Yosemite.” It is true that the icons of the park are not a focus of mine. Instead, for forty-three years, I have happily photographed the park’s more intimate details. Hopefully, I have captured images that others might otherwise have missed.

As for many others, Yosemite is a magical place to me. I see Yosemite as my most important teacher, as a place where I have felt so at home, at peace, and energized by the special landscape. With a strong desire to create my own unique view of Yosemite, I have always found wondrous compositions everywhere I go, be it far from the road or while standing before the famous landmarks. This comfort level allowed me to take risks. My goal has been to make photographs beyond the ordinary and still create images with a sense of place, of Yosemite.

For most photographers who don’t have a landscape such as Yosemite as their backyard, I believe that any landscape one really gets to know can serve as one’s strongest mentor. Knowing the weather, feeling the light, sensing that landscape’s most expressive moments, and learning the moods of each season are all vital factors to creating meaningful images.

The photograph that opens this essay was made on my way to somewhere else, unplanned and unscheduled. It was made standing on the side of the road, with the road in between the ice-covered rock wall and me. Many years before, I had photographed icicles along this same area, so I was aware enough to glance in that direction as I was driving along this stretch of road. A lot of good images can come from scouting and planning a photo shoot, but it doesn’t work for me. My best images are largely those that were unexpected.

I photographed this scene with both my 4x5 and my Canon 1DS Mark II and used my tripod. The image shown here was made with the Canon camera. A friend who was with me also set up his tripod and 4x5 camera to photograph the ice. When we stopped on the side of the road, no one else was there. During those thirty minutes, I estimate that twenty to thirty vehicles either stopped to take a quick snapshot or slowed down to enjoy the icicles. A few more photographers with tripods also set up to photograph. Even before seeing the results of my efforts (let alone printing or publishing any images), I had succeeded in helping others see what the road passes by.

While a single image like this one is not obviously a Yosemite image, a collective group of intimate, creative photographs of Yosemite or any landscape, whether taken by me or anyone else, can tell the viewers volumes about a place if we are truly seeing it through our own eyes. The lessons that a landscape can teach us are to slow down, to look inward as well as outward, to look for light or image design in composing images that elevate the ordinary to the extraordinary, and to trust our own vision of our world over someone else’s.

“I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found was really going in.”

– JOHN MUIR, NATURALIST

Redbud and Dogwood | Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee | 1991