My MFA Show, *Desolation's Comfort: Photographic Recollections* opened at the John F. Kennedy University Arts & Consciousness Gallery on October 1, 2007. It's been a year. Creating big shows is like giving blood. It takes awhile for the body (in this case, *soul*) to replenish itself. It was hard for me to look at the images from that show for quite some time. This week, I took the dust off the metaphorical storage box and started working on my *Desolation's Comfort* images yet again. It was finally time to revisit the work and add new images to the collection.
There is nothing like doing nothing after a big adventure. The senses need some calming after being bombarded with the stimuli of travel. One must return to a place that is familiar and quiet. Oak Creek Canyon, just north of Sedona, Arizona, has provided me with *il dolce far niente* (the sweetness of doing nothing) for many, many years. For the past few years, I've ended great adventures into Grand Canyon with a week of nothingness in Oak Creek Canyon. It is that combination of that seems to be so very satisfying.
Summer hikes in the great Southwest are seductive. The morning scents of sage and pine intoxicate the soul and activate something in the brain that says, "Walk!" One feels free and both big and small under the huge sky. Making us feel like a child just learning to get about, the big land beckons us to explore it. "Walk!"
Indian Gardens is an oasis on the Bright Angel Trail. Deep in Grand Canyon, it has water, shade, bathrooms, and benches. On the way back up to the rim, it's the last flat (relatively speaking) area before one encounters the tortuous switchbacks. On the way out of Indian Gardens, the ground is still of reasonable incline. It's seductive. You know you're already halfway up to the rim from the river (in terms of distance) so you say to yourself, "This isn't so bad, we're halfway home." Of course, one isn't halfway home in terms of exertion. The party has just begun.
Sometimes the best images are not of grand adventures, but are found in quiet, fleeting moments of convergence. After last year's Grand Canyon hike I rested in Sedona for a few days, enjoying a comfortable room with a big, soft bed. I looked out the window and, discovered a scene that seemed worthy of recording.
Thirty years pass quickly. Suddenly I found myself at the bottom of Grand Canyon. In my heart I still felt like the sleepy-eyed kid my father had dragged out of bed to see the canyon sunrise. Part of me, when in a room full of adults, will always feel like a young buck. My brain's solder connections are hard-wired in that way. Serious adults always make me squirm like a teenager.
My father had decided that we'd watch the sunrise over Grand Canyon. It was an ungodly hour for any pimply teenager. It was dark and I'd finally found a comfortable spot in an otherwise lumpy motel bed. I groaned and pulled the covers over my head. The old man was crazy. I wasn't moving.
Veteran hikers of the Great Southwest know that midday clouds mean afternoon rain. Sometimes the rain is ferocious in intensity, bringing to life desert flora and seemingly moribund riverbeds. The casual hiker notices little. The clouds form in silence, first noticed by the dancing shadows on the desert floor. The shade is welcome, a brief respite from the sun's rays.
I've been training for next month's big Grand Canyon hike. So, last Friday my friend and I took a hike on the Coastal Trail near my home. While it is impossible to mimic the conditions of the canyon in the cool, coastal climate of the Bay Area, the Coastal Trail has plenty of inclines for a good cardio workout. The fog was thick on Friday, so dense it made the entire hike feel like a dream.
Timothy O'Sullivan, Eadward Muybridge, Carlton Watkins, and William Henry Jackson are our great artistic ancestors in this regard. Carrying massive cameras and using the wet collodion process (wet plate) these photographers burned the grandness of the West into the American consciousness. Photography was a different kind of dedication back then. Glass plates had to be exposed still wet, after being coated by hand in makeshift darkrooms.
