Forrest Gump Point

Author's Comments

The cliche is the cliche for a reason. The road runs straight at the buttes, the lines converge, the formations rise out of the desert floor like something staged for the camera, and you understand within about thirty seconds why this frame has been made ten million times. The honest question is whether you can make it again and have it mean anything. I think you can, but only at certain hours and only with some patience. Early morning is the window. The light comes in low from the east and rakes across the red rock, and the buttes hold their shadows in a way they will not hold them by ten. The asphalt warms. The sky behind the formations goes from cold blue to something with more pink in it than you expect. If you arrive before sunrise and wait, you will get maybe forty minutes of light that actually matters. A long lens does the heavy work here. Compression is the entire trick. The wider you go, the smaller the buttes read, and the photograph becomes a road with some hills at the end of it. Pull the formations forward with a 200mm or longer and the image becomes what your memory of the place will become. Stand well off the pavement. The trucks come through fast and they are not slowing down for anyone with a tripod. I have stood on that shoulder in January with frost still on the sage and again in late September when the air was still warm at six in the morning, and both times the photograph was essentially the same photograph. That is the nature of this place. You are not discovering it. You are joining a long line, and the work is to bring something of your own hour to it.

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