Tear Drop Arch

Author's Comments

There are arches in the Southwest that have become their own industry, and then there are arches like this one. Tear Drop is small. It is not the headline. You will not find a line of tripods waiting at sunrise, because you cannot get here without a Navajo guide and a willingness to spend the morning on roads that do not appear on most maps. The opening itself is modest, shaped roughly like its name, and it does exactly what a good frame is supposed to do. It disappears. What you see through it is Monument Valley reduced to its essentials - a few buttes in the middle distance, the floor of the valley going pale red, the sky doing whatever the sky decides to do that morning. In November the light comes in low and cold, and the inside of the arch warms against the cool blue of the far valley in a way that makes the photograph almost compose itself. I went with a guide named Larry the first time, and we sat at the arch for nearly an hour while he told me which buttes had which names and I worked through three different focal lengths trying to figure out the frame. Wide is the obvious choice. But there is a tighter composition, somewhere around 35mm, where the arch stops being a gimmick and starts being a window, and that is the one I kept. Come in the cold months. Come early. Let the guide set the pace, because the pace is part of what this place is. You are a guest here, and the photograph is better for remembering it.

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